Most people will move the mouse pointer in some way to try to locate it visually - spotting a moving object is much more efficient than a static object (plus many programs hide mouse pointer when the user starts typing, and only show it again when it is moved). It's a natural thing that has to occur to try and improve the inherit inefficiency. This is something subconscious, but each person has developed a 'synchronization' pattern or habit for mouse use. That's because it is a visual representation - you must see the pointer and watch it to control it. That includes when you switch from the keyboard to the mouse. Because the representation is virtual, you have to synchronize your brain with the pointer every time you begin using it. You control a virtual construct (the pointer) on the display using a device in our world. The mouse is a virtual representation INSIDE the computing environment. I've written on this before (and I've never seen much discussion about it), but I'll go ahead and expound on it. There's a reason for that and I'll explain. The worst possible interaction is having to continuously switch back and forth between input methods. As you've discovered, you can interact much more efficiently with a keyboard. I'm just saying they're absolutely terrible from a UX perspective, but used properly are good tools for power users, and power users only.įirst off, the mouse (and touchpad) is overused. I'm not saying keyboard shortcuts are terrible. But to the person that said they saved 60 hours a week in Gmail, I ask them this plain and simple: WHAT THEY FUCK ARE YOU EVEN DOING THAT TAKES 60 HOURS TO BEGIN WITH!?Ī hybrid environment is best. Yeah, programs started with keyboards and some shortcuts are actual shortcuts. Also, dealing with certain types of multi-tasking between multiple virtual environments would become an absolute pain in the ass.Īlso, requiring having a cheat sheet on your desk just to list keyboard shortcuts? This goes to show just how insanely unintuitive they are to begin with. This would be impossible without a pointing device of some kind. For instance, I do a significant amount of multimedia work. This is a hard requirement, not a superficial one. If you limit yourself to simple tasks, they can be accomplished simply. I don't game on my PC, but from what I hear, this would also be quite difficult without a mouse.ĭepends on your tasks. Similarly, doing anything that involved image editing in Photoshop was basically impossible. I haunt a number of forums and found it a little tedious to have to ctrl+f whatever item I wanted to 'click' on. Admittedly, not everything was rosy without a mouse.

If nothing else, it made the experience of using a laptop way less miserable because I didn't have to touch the touchpad. Indeed, one shortcut evangelist suggests that switching to keyboard shortcuts in Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year. I found that they saved me a ton of time, especially on tedious tasks like deleting emails.

I also had to do a little set up for certain applications, such as Gmail, which doesn't have many of its most useful shortcuts turned on by default, such as the ability to select all unread messages or the ability to move between messages with only a single keystroke.īy the end of my week without a mouse, many of the shortcuts were already beginning to feel like second nature. All the other important shortcuts I wrote down on a notepad I kept on my desk for reference. It took about a day and a half before I had memorized all the shortcuts that I would be using on a regular basis. If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic. It was a limited form of digital detox, a way of trying to understand the way people used computers before the computer mouse became widely adopted for commercial machines in the 1980s. Slashdot reader dmoberhaus writes via Motherboard: Over the course of the next five days, I relied solely on my keyboard to navigate the web and my local hard drive.

Mouseless computer