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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

> For text editing, mouse is more inefficient than keystrokes

Your evidence for that is provided by the fact that the world eagerly adopted the mouse and abandoned vi/vim and similar programs, based solely on the advantages of modern methods.

Your evidence for that is provided by the fact that I wrote an incremental improvement over vi, one that exploited the existence of control keys but didn't exploit a nonexistent mouse, and, even though it represented no great improvement, I retired on the proceeds at the age of 35. (My program was appropriately eclipsed by better, more advanced programs, that among other things did exploit the mouse.)

> I'm not sure if you're just joking or you're just misinformed.

Wake up and smell the Cappuccino. You are not living in reality.

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There is indeed a massive advantage of a mouse over a keyboard-based interface - it's far, far more discoverable for novice or occasional users. In fact, I'd venture to say the mouse (and the corresponding advent of discoverable graphical interfaces) was the primary driver of making computers accessible to non-techies and hence largely responsible for the computing revolution.

But, a keyboard-based interface is still more efficient for someone who can put in the time to learning how to use it efficiently (and customizing it to their specific work), and uses it regularly enough to maintain that knowledge. For a lot of people who write code for a living, a text editor definitely falls in that area.

> But, a keyboard-based interface is still more efficient ...

This has been proven false any number of times. It's false when comparing mouse use against a modern keyboard with control and function keys, and it is certainly false for the limited keyboards for which vi/vim was designed, those keyboards that result in vi/vim not being able to exploit control characters.

Source: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

Quote: "We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster."

The above quote comes from a study performed a while ago and repeated ad infinitum since then.

> those keyboards that result in vi/vim not being able to exploit control characters.

Modern vim uses control characters just fine. Have you used it any time in the last decade?

Because you seem to dance around that question a lot, saying "Well when did I say I haven't used vim recently" whenever someone brings it up, and then saying something else completely wrong that indicates you have no idea how a modern version of vim is actually used.

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