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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly how I feel. With text-mode interfaces I have the feeling of telling the application what I want it to do in verbal terms, which I find easier to remember than which button or menu selection does what I want.

The author states: The disadvantage I feel most keenly when using a terminal is the cognitive load. I have to keep more in my head when using a terminal/command-line-based interface. Again I find the opposite to be the case. When I use Visual Studio I feel overwhelmed by the GUI. Panels and scroll bars everywhere, buttons, menus, etc. Contrast to Emacs, where I have, very simply, one large area for editing text. I can focus on what I'm doing.

It's sort of a Feng Shui thing: the busy GUI is the cluttered room that drains your positive energy and causes constant low-level stress. The text interface is the well-organized room that has everything you need but it's out of the way until you actually use it.

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I agree with you as well. However, this should be taken into account (wish I could find a reference for this):

"A study done by Bruce Tognazinni when we was at Apple (a company that has had a good track record of designing for the mouse) showed that using the keyboard felt faster but was slower while using the mouse felt slower but was actually faster."

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

It definitely depends on what you're doing and how your interface is set up. If you're editing text in a non-monospace font at a non-super-high font size, and you want to insert between (say) two lowercase L characters, you need some fairly precision mousework, and that takes time.

And it will almost certainly always be easier to do actually complex operations via text (especially if you might be repeating them or slightly modifying them). Just yesterday I was generating a PDF packet with pdftk, and had a command line of the form "pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf blank.pdf file3.pdf cat output outfile.pdf" that I kept having to re-run (because I'd modified file2.pdf) or tweak (because I added file4.pdf). It's possible that the first pdftk would have been quicker in a GUI---though I'm not convinced---but in the aggregate there's no way a series of GUI ops would have been faster. And I'm not even sure how I'd accomplish something like "mv *.jpg jpg_subdir/" in something like Finder without a lot of manual finding and clicking and dragging and making mistakes.

The Visual Studio GUI probably is suboptimal. You may be distracted from the editing window sometimes by the other controls. One thing you can do is disable or hide many of the Visual Studio controls.

However, the cognitive load of this distraction is lower than that of having to remember keyboard commands.

Once you have spent a certain amount of time in EMacs, (a very long time) most of those keyboard interactions will become subconscious. Its a long time though. Also, the most frequently used keyboard commands are available in the GUI interface for people that choose to learn them. And environments like Visual Studio are often fully customizable, enabling users to add their own keyboard shortcuts, macros, etc.

One feature in most GUI environments that you may not have discovered is the 'Tool Tip'. By hovering your mouse cursor over various toolbar buttons you can cause a short textual description to appear.

> However, the cognitive load of this distraction is lower than that of having to remember keyboard commands.

I do not find this to be the case. But then, there are various keyboard commands, both in Vim and on the command line, that I do not really have to call to mind before using. I just type them when needed.

It’s really weird how that works, actually, how with many things (I’ve noticed this with GUI interfaces, too) the mind will learn it to the point where you don’t need the conscious part of you to be aware of it anymore.

So I think this is really about what we’re most used to, what our mind has adapted to. I feel very clumsy if I’m editing in something other than Vim, because that’s what I’ve adapted to.

For a time, I had gotten used to typing correct apostrophes and quotes ( ‘ ” “ ), such that I could no longer automatically type a ' or ". I had to think about those primes if those were what I wanted, although the quotes are certainly harder to type.

So what am I saying here? I guess I’m saying that we can’t rely on our own experience too heavily — whichever interface we find we have to think more to use may be far more natural for another, and all of that may be entirely irrelevant from an objective standpoint.

The point is that the windows/toolbars/icons/tooltips/buttons/mouse/etc. GUI is an interface you can learn and apply everywhere with minimal inspection required to get up and started using an unfamiliar GUI, whereas textual interfaces take much more investment in time to learn and effort to inspect.

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