My 20+ year career has been programming for Linux. You won't find a mouse on my desk, because I bought Thinkpad USB keyboards. I have a full-size one with numeric keypad in my office at work, not because I use the keypad but because it makes the whole thing slightly more stable on my desk.

I don't really use the touchpad part though---I use the "track-point" pointing stick embedded in the center of the keyboard. Without that, I feel like I was transported back in time and placed in front of a VT220 terminal or some dusty old Sun workstation. I am concerned that these seem discontinued, but I also have spare travel-sized units which may last for the rest of my career...

I prefer touchpads because the travel time to them is much lower. They also are always in the same place. I can even use them with my thumb while leaving my fingers on the home row.

Really?

Why not?

Why would you use a mouse if you're on a laptop? Especially a macbook, where the trackpad is fantastic to use and offers gestures which give you features you don't get with a mouse.

Gestures are awful... They're nonstandard between boxes, and often flaky as all hell. One of the first things I disable on a new OS install.

Why wouldn't you use a mouse, and get better precision, a standard form-factor, and universally solid drivers? Besides, you can take your mouse and plug it into any machine you need to work on.

Gestures on Macs are not flaky. That's kind of the whole point of this discussion.

> Why wouldn't you use a mouse, and get better precision, a standard form-factor, and universally solid drivers?

Most non-Mac-users do. Mac users don't, because they have a touchpad with better precision, a standard form factor and solid drivers. Hence this post. Why should I need to carry a peripheral everywhere for functionality my laptop purportedly has integrated?

One could counter-argue that touchpad is inherently worse than a mouse, but I think you'll find Apple have roundly disproven that. There's a reason the Magic Trackpad exists (though I've never owned one, demand seems to be there).

A mouse is fine in an environment where you also have an external monitor and maybe an external keyboard too.

Cause I don't want to carry it around, and potentially lose it.

To take that a step further, who would use a touchpad or a mouse over a keyboard?

The downvotes are really telling...

For most use cases pointing devices makes you less productive than using a keyboard. Going forth and back between keyboard and a pointing device is even worse.

Spend the time to optimize your workflow to be pointer-free as much as you can and you'll never go back.

I think it's that attitude that people are downvoting. There is more than one way to be a developer; there are many different workflows that are possible. The fraction of a second that I might lose by using a pointing device is made up for by not having to set up and memorize arcane and sometimes rarely documented key combinations that might not be the same from program to program and system to system.