Stephen's Personal Blog

A long time ago, before most of you had a computer, there was a war between the keyboard and the mouse. The mouse won, but you occasionally see the losing side working slavishly for the winners.

When computers were green text on black background everything had to go through the keyboard. To do anything you had to memorize the keyboard command. You might be familiar with some of the hold-overs like the copy (ctrl-c)/paste (ctrl-v) commands or undo (ctrl-z). The reasoning was that once you got over the hump of memorizing the commands you were much faster than dragging an arrow around.

Perhaps the last proponents of this belief are the older data entry operators who would rather use a green screen w/o all the fancy scroll bars. Everything is a code and they do nothing all day, but bang away of the keyboard.

The mouse cuts down on the learning curve. Two buttons plus 800 X 600 pixels gives the designer a whole lot more options than 109 keys. The mouse interface is much better looking and easier to use. Taking a hand off the keyboard to move the mouse slows you down.

There is one thing I care about and that is the delay on repeatative tasks. Things like adding a new folder, renaming a file, copy, move, etc. use to be way faster to execute on the command line. Like “ren “, versus “Right Click, Wait, Click Rename, Type and hit Enter.” One of the worst things is adding a new folder, because this was really, really fast; “md “. That right click and waiting is a killer.

So, how can you get around it? Keyboard shortcuts. These respond almost instantly and the mouse isn’t required. Here are some common ones for me as a developer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.