[Haskell-cafe] Re: Editor

[Ketil Malde]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 10:19 +0200, apfelmus wrote:

> http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
> 
> It adresses the question whether selecting commands in menus with the
> mouse or accessing them via keyboard shortcuts is faster. The answer is:
> 
>  "* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
>     mousing.
>   * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than
>     keyboarding."

Interesting!  I did a quick test doing search and replace using the
keyboard and the menus in Emacs.  It takes me about six seconds with the
keyboard, and closer to ten using the menus.  (The first time, it took
thirty as I spent time to locate the correct menu options :-)

But I agree with the report that using the mouse *feels* a lot slower. 
Quoting the report: "It takes two seconds to decide upon which
special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a
high-level cognitive function."

I'm not so sure I agree, using the mouse feels way more abrupt and
intrusive.  I can do M-x repl TAB str TAB foo RET bar RET with my eyes
closed¹, but to use the mouse, I need to locate the mouse with my hand,
locate the mouse cursor, locate the menu, etc etc.

Maybe that'd change if I used the mouse more?

-k

¹ I can, but probably shouldn't.  I just tried, but didn't realize focus
was not in Emacs but my mail client - which consequently promptly did a
bunch of unpredictable things to my draft.