Re:Seven habits of effective text editing (2000)
by gumby on Monday October 23, 2017 @02:16PM
(#15535509)
> ...it still never beat GUI editors for me. The lack of a mouse cursor was always a pain point - for example simple copy/pastes take notably longer.
Everybody's milage can vary; in my case it's 100% the opposite. Moving my hands off the keyboard is a demonstrable microinterruption.
FWIW I've been using both text and mouse-based editors since I was 14, roughly 40 years. Some of the time was in deeply mouse-oriented environments (e.g. Xerox PARC in the era when Stu Card was proving that the mouse is indeed a better input approach for a plurality of people -- so I'm not claiming that the mouse is a bad idea in principle). But the keyboard is just so much more direct for me -- I don't have to look at it, and often don't move my eye from the insertion point on the screen even when referring to something elsewhere on the screen.
Everybody's milage can vary; in my case it's 100% the opposite. Moving my hands off the keyboard is a demonstrable microinterruption.
FWIW I've been using both text and mouse-based editors since I was 14, roughly 40 years. Some of the time was in deeply mouse-oriented environments (e.g. Xerox PARC in the era when Stu Card was proving that the mouse is indeed a better input approach for a plurality of people -- so I'm not claiming that the mouse is a bad idea in principle). But the keyboard is just so much more direct for me -- I don't have to look at it, and often don't move my eye from the insertion point on the screen even when referring to something elsewhere on the screen.