Love Computers, Hate Mice

Mice are awesome and all, but let's think about this in terms of the best way to interface with a computer.

A mouse. You can move it and touch things and grab things. It's like your hands! No it's not. You can feel with your hands. You don't have to look at them when you pick things up or move things. A mouse is based solely on visual feedback for reference information. You have to continuously watch the mouse to know where it is and if it's where you want it. The mouse itself gives you no information as to the pointer's x or y values or even the pointer's maximum or minimum x and y values. All your information comes from the screen. It's only a device for relative manipulation of data. You move it left, the pointer moves left, etc.

Keyboards are a bunch of binary buttons (1 or 0) that you can physically feel the state of when using. You don't have to look at the screen after every button press to know that it did something on the computer. With very very rare exception, your pressing a single button will be received as the corresponding message on the computer. It's non-relative too, as your lack of pressing buttons means that every key's value is 0.

This means I can either stare at the screen while I move my mouse from wherever it is to the beginning of the line I'm on, or I can hit Home and be there. Likewise to get to the second word of the second line from anywhere in the first line, I just have to hit Home, Down, Ctrl+Right.

Attention to potential is the most important part of design in my opinion. To maximize potential with in interface design, you need to reduce the processing load required by the user's brain, and what's more the unconscious part of the brain. The conscious part will get used to it eventually and develop mastery. Sacrificing accuracy for initial ease of use is catering to the conscious brain. He should be focusing on what the task is, though, not how to perform it.

The read/write cycle for using a mouse needs to run hundreds or thousands of times (albeit in less than a second) to reach success, whereas the cycle for keyboard input remains in single digits, and only so for cases such as, "Shit, I hit 'W' instead of 'Q'." Furthermore, the accuracy of input/output between you and the computer is far superior on the keyboard and this promotes mastery.

This is why trackers and Emacs/Vi are still around after so many years. The more reliable and consistent your input mechanism is, the less time you have to spend interfacing with the machine and the more time you have to DO THINGS.

but they're so cute, they have li'l tails and all!

yeah nothing like memorizing obscure key combinations for all the programs you use.

there's a bunch of OSs by nerds that remove any need for a mouse. I think one of the popular ones is called rat killer. They're used by the same people who make their own keyboards that look totally absurd, or are in 2 pieces for each hand, and more nerdy stuff.

  On 7/5/2010 at 5:50 AM, chenGOD said:

yeah nothing like memorizing obscure key combinations for all the programs you use.

using a DAW or playing an fps without a mouse would blow chunks, at least for my feeble brain

  On 7/5/2010 at 9:32 AM, Gocab said:

  On 7/5/2010 at 5:50 AM, chenGOD said:

yeah nothing like memorizing obscure key combinations for all the programs you use.

or you could get a Mac (just stop reading this post if you feel offended by that statement), where key combos are somewhat consistent throughout the system. So for example, hitting [cmd]+[ , ] will bring up the preferences pane for the frontmost app.

[cmd]+[shift]+[/] is a really helpful system-wide shortcut. Will bring up the help section for the frontmost program and highlight the Search field like so:

where you can just start to type menu items, which will then conveniently be expanded and marked with a nice big arrow.

Navigate through results with arrow keys, hit enter to confirm.

Not everyone is born to be a keyboard commando, but once you get into the habit you'll soon notice that it's the most comfortable and efficient input method indeed.

Then you'll want more, faster.

try Launchbar (skip 1 minute into the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w_vkIItEb4#t=1min1sec

which will make your mouse almost obsolete.

emacs/vi? oh really? text editors where keyboards are still supreme? fuck off.

  On 7/5/2010 at 10:16 AM, phling said:

try Launchbar [...] which will make your mouse almost obsolete.

oh, sweet, i can use launchbar to load my favorite websites really easily, and then i can use my arrow and page up/down keys to scroll around the page and then i can hold down tab to get way the fuck down to the link that i found interesting, and then i can hold down shift-tab cause i went too far, and then press tab a couple more times to really for real select my link, then press enter. awesome! and then i can load an image into photoshop really easily with launchbar and then photoshop the hell out of it by mashing my keyboard like a fucking raging autistic nerd until icanhascheezburger.com is raving over my wonderful creation! thanks launchbar+keyboard!

try valium then.

I use a tiling window manager, vimperator and do most of my work in vim to get rid of my mouse. Rarely rely on the mouse these days. I find pointing and clicking buttons much more distracting and slow than learning shortcuts. A shortcut becomes second nature very quickly, but pointing and pressing a compile button on the toolbar of an IDE will always be awkward. And navigating through code with a mouse kills my elbow.

the new windows voice recognition works surprisingly well but it's very slow

  On 7/5/2010 at 4:48 PM, Fishtank said:

the new windows voice recognition works surprisingly well but it's very slow

Methinks this would be more cumbersome than a mouse, as its accuracy is even lower and the time required per command is more.

Mouses.

Mousse

Meese

And yeah, slipped my mind. It's mouses.

i don't know man. right now i'm looking at a 2D plane with hundreds of visual elements. it might be possible to select elements or areas with hotkeys, but for using a complex system with a visual interface, a mouse does me a lot of good.

i actually do hate mice per se, but the trackpad is where i get my game on.

Text editing? Sure, i for one love vi and using it when editing code/ text files, no need for mouse. But when it comes to bulky programs with many functions, Unless I use them often, I don't want to reley on kb commands(unless universal). It's nice to have analog input sometimes.

  On 7/6/2010 at 5:22 AM, Bubba69 said:

It's nice to have analog input sometimes.

sometimes

Exactly.

mice were a design decision to get away from the exactitude you cited. there's a trade off between usability and expressiveness -- it's just a different point. also.. have you ever used linux (you mention vim and emacs)? the linux kernel + a shell is exactly what you're looking for. and it's been around for more than 30 years. the concept of the meta key pretty much nails it as well (using alt to get into menus, etc). its true the mouse has to be polled a lot (it's a discrete approximation of a continuous signal) so the rate at which you read determines your resolution. since keyboards are more or less binary state they can function with interrupts (when i get pushed, i send a signal to the OS). for a mouse, which always emits a signal, doing this would require the computer to be reading all of the time. that said, polling the mouse requires almost 0 processing power and incurs no noticeable delay in anything, really. also, a typical polling rate for a mouse is about 2ms (that's 500 times a second, not billions!).

tl;dr

mice are pretty sweet and incur no noticeable delay in computation, making computers more accessible and useful. mice are essential for anything dealing with graphics (photoshop with a keyboard would require as much visual tracking with less ease). if you're tired of mice (as i find myself from time to time), kill your window manager and work within a shell. i like zsh!

  On 7/6/2010 at 6:57 AM, bigs said:

mice were a design decision to get away from the exactitude you cited. there's a trade off between usability and expressiveness -- it's just a different point. also.. have you ever used linux (you mention vim and emacs)? the linux kernel + a shell is exactly what you're looking for. and it's been around for more than 30 years. the concept of the meta key pretty much nails it as well (using alt to get into menus, etc). its true the mouse has to be polled a lot (it's a discrete approximation of a continuous signal) so the rate at which you read determines your resolution. since keyboards are more or less binary state they can function with interrupts (when i get pushed, i send a signal to the OS). for a mouse, which always emits a signal, doing this would require the computer to be reading all of the time. that said, polling the mouse requires almost 0 processing power and incurs no noticeable delay in anything, really. also, a typical polling rate for a mouse is about 2ms (that's 500 times a second, not billions!).

 

tl;dr

mice are pretty sweet and incur no noticeable delay in computation, making computers more accessible and useful. mice are essential for anything dealing with graphics (photoshop with a keyboard would require as much visual tracking with less ease). if you're tired of mice (as i find myself from time to time), kill your window manager and work within a shell. i like zsh!

<---big linux nerd

Mostly played with stripped down Slackware (no X, ect), Ubuntu, Knoppix, some music distros, and some embedded stuff. Meta key ftw.

Also, with the computation part of it, I'm talking about the user's brain's processing, not the computer's. That's the important distinction. A computer operating a computer via mouse would always move the pointer exactly to its target in the shortest time/distance possible. We approximate while computers are concrete, and thus we must be treated differently. Also, there is a noticeable delay between when you move your eyes to a point and your brain actually registers the new image, and that's a hurdle as well.

And yeah, you definitely need to have a mouse for some things, but even in Photoshop, if I need to adjust things minutely, I'm gonna nudge things with the keys.

nanoseconds

The funny thing is, I have a Mac and for the commands I use all the time, then yes I use the keyboard. But that method of going to the help menu every time is a bit silly. Also that particular combo is useless say in Firefox.

I prefer Quicksilver to launchbar.

I couldn't imagine trying to use Reason with a keyboard. Fortunately, I don't have to.

  On 7/6/2010 at 7:26 AM, wahrk said:

<---big linux nerd

woo! greets.

  On 7/6/2010 at 7:26 AM, wahrk said:

Mostly played with stripped down Slackware (no X, ect), Ubuntu, Knoppix, some music distros, and some embedded stuff. Meta key ftw.

 

Also, with the computation part of it, I'm talking about the user's brain's processing, not the computer's. That's the important distinction. A computer operating a computer via mouse would always move the pointer exactly to its target in the shortest time/distance possible. We approximate while computers are concrete, and thus we must be treated differently. Also, there is a noticeable delay between when you move your eyes to a point and your brain actually registers the new image, and that's a hurdle as well.

 

And yeah, you definitely need to have a mouse for some things, but even in Photoshop, if I need to adjust things minutely, I'm gonna nudge things with the keys.

everything's gotta be discrete for any computer (be it our brain, or a cpu) to handle it -- our eyes have a "refresh rate" of about 60hz. our brains are actually much more "analog" computers than we are, but the point stands: mousing requires visual feedback... so does moving any of your appendages! a mouse "works" because it really does become an extension of our bodies -- like driving a car. to make things easier for the user, we have to make things harder for the computer. maybe someday there will be a system that can understand natural language and compute accordingly (actually, a few guys in my department are doing research on that! i'm more in systems) but, sadly, it's a ways off :(

we'll just have to keep hacking at our shells until then!

Nice thread wahrk. I can recommend OSX too because its hotkeys are consistent throughout the entire OS, but if youre experienced with linux you probably have more power there.

  Quote

Attention to potential is the most important part of design in my opinion. To maximize potential with in interface design' date=' you need to reduce the processing load required by the user's brain, and what's more the unconscious part of the brain. The conscious part will get used to it eventually and develop mastery. Sacrificing accuracy for initial ease of use is catering to the conscious brain. He should be focusing on what the task is, though, not how to perform it.[/quote']

 

That's a great point. I think the mouse is a short-term solution and not a realization of the potential that computer interfaces can have. Lots of mouse-intensive programs that lack key commands can get aggravating / physically strenuous just because you have to navigate all over the screen to click icons that are an arbitrary distance apart from eachother over and over. At least if more UI's were modular and I could group buttons I use in sequence for certain tasks then I would be moving the mouse less distance and I could do things faster / with less effort. Still, it's a relative system and absolute control in a keyboard is much more reliable in my opinion.

 

I should try a tracker. they sound cool.