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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

> I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice.

I imagine that developers would prefer mice if people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably prefer mice, and I suspect people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably do prefer mice, the same way that I believe we prefer good keyboards and good monitors.

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I prefer good mice and good trackpads to poor mice and poor trackpads. But trackpads vs mice? Your comment insinuates a that a clear good/bad dichotomy exists here but I don't think that's generally the case. My above comment notes one context where I do believe that's true, but in the general case? For standard desktop interactions? I don't think mice are objectively better. If anything the proximity of a trackpad makes it better, but that's certainly debatable.

I feel like a good touchpad (meaning Apple) is superior to most good mice for general desktop usage. What pushes touchpads clearly ahead is when you make good use of multi-touch gestures. Using third-party tools under macOS, about half of my most commonly used keyboard shortcuts can be replaced by gestures that are quicker and easier than reaching for the keyboard. The handful of apps with native multitouch and support for haptic feedback through the touchpad are also really nice.

I still use a mouse for gaming, but I have to replace it every ~3 years because the buttons start to wear out. That has yet to happen to one of my Apple touchpads.

I do like and use multi-touch gestures a lot, though I think 'hot corners' and additional mouse buttons could probably fill the same roll for me. My intellimouse (P/N X08-70385) has five buttons and in the past I've mapped those two extras to forward/backward browser commands and it worked pretty well. If you can get your hands on an intellimouse, I highly recommend it; mine is somewhere around 15-20 years old with yellowed plastic but it's still going strong. Best product ever sold by Microsoft imho.

Forward and back is just the tip of the iceberg. I also have gestures for switching between tabs (sending Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab to applications), closing and un-closing tabs, opening a new tab, middle clicking, refreshing a page, scrolling to the top or bottom of the page, maximizing a window. And that's on top of the gestures provided natively by macOS.

For my day to day noodling around I use a track-pad. But for dev work I use a mouse. The click drag bits are wildly better with a mouse. For example text highlighting and moving things around in the GUI.

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