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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

This progression is impressive and the examples are visually stunning but I'm a bit concerned about how much the mouse is being used. When there's too many panels, fields and values on the screen, how do you keep your hands on the keyboard?

In the IDEs that I've tried, I find them impossible to use if there aren't keyboard shortcuts for everything. As an extreme example, take a look at Eclim which merges the functionality of the Eclipse code engine with the GUI of vi - http://eclim.org/index.html (note that I don't use this as my daily editor - I'm not proficient enough yet or perhaps it's just a bit too extreme).

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Actually, several of those editors were explorations of what programming would look like using just the mouse. The mouse isn't really the issue with programming performance, per se -- instead the problem is the constant context switching back and forth.

Several version focused on just the keyboard, but we found that most of the things we built using Eve were inherently visual, and as such needed to be tested and interacted with using the mouse. Since we can't eliminate that context shift, we tried doubling down on it.

As a die hard Emacs user, I was shocked by just how competitive the mouse could be in the smalltalk-esque environment we built.

I noticed I had a video of the "calculator" interface we designed to try and make mouse/touch-only interaction possible. I've made it public for anyone interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT8shMtBZsY

EDIT: Fixed the link

Your link is broken, I think you accidentally linked to the upload page.

Ah, thanks for the tip. Fixed now.

The mouse is useful for video demonstrations because you can see what operations are being selected. We actually were convinced Eve would be better than most languages for keyboard use because A) most programs were very short, so fewer keystrokes over all and B) most programs could be built with autocomplete. The implication here was that we could enable programming on a phone with very minimal keyboard input, and mostly touch. Madlibs Eve was an example of this, where building a program could be done over SMS or chat.

It's near impossible to create shortcuts for everything. A modern IDE may contain thousands of possible actions at any given time.

That said, however, modern IDEs:

- have shortcuts for many dozens (possibly in the hundreds) of most commonly used actions

- allow you to map any action to a shortcut of your choosing

- allow you to search for a particular action via a keyboard shortcut with fuzzy matching, which is often faster than trying to remember the shortcut for a rarely used action.

That depends on all of those actions being discrete, of course. If they aren't, then keyboard mappings aren't very useful.

It's still very possible to put shortcuts on traditional mouse interactions. I don't find that this should be a significant hurdle.

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