News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Going mouseless. Parent comment

Re:Going mouseless by sodapopcan on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @07:50PM (#28067947)
One of the most brilliant programmers I worked with had a 14-button mouse. It had cut/copy/paste/select all/etc all on his mouse. He hated typing and actually couldn't touch type. He would always look for code online he could just copy/paste with minimal modification. I thought he was out of his mind but the dude produced amazing results and I think to this day I've still learned more from him about programming than I have from any of the other amazing people I've worked with.

I love to think keyboard is king, but none of this matters—it's whatever floats your boat.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Going mouseless by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @09:23PM (#28068621)
Thats a great story. Sounds almost like a mini-keyboard that slides around on a pad. :)

However I wonder if the person(s) who authored the code he copied and pasted also used only mouse, let alone one with 14 buttons.

"... it's whatever floats your boat."

True. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth

If someone designs a system for input where I can only use a mouse, for me thats a boat sinker. Not that I love keyboards, it's just they are better than anything else I have found.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Going mouseless by sodapopcan on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @10:07PM (#28068935)
> Sounds almost like a mini-keyboard that slides around on a pad. :)

...except that it was a one-to-one mapping of function to button kinda deal. He didn't have time for fancy things like key-combos!

Yeah, who knows what programming will look like in the future. I'm a huge stay-on-the-keyboard snob but also, I have `set mouse=a` in my vimrc because often I want to hold a drink in one hand scroll through code with another. Shoot-me-why-don't-ya!?? And heck, sometimes it's just that my right hand was already on my mouse to use a macOS feature and now now my left hand cmd-tabbed me back to vim. It's all about laziness, right? My right hand does quickly find itself back on the home row in the latter situation, of course.

colorForth intrigues me.

[ Parent | on HN ]