Mice and keys
~detritus
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Fuck I hate having to use the mouse.
Yeah, I am mostly used to ye olde virtual terminal, and to
environments such as that of emacs, where everything is done with
the keyboard. I find it a lot more immediate to issue my commands
through a simple keystroke than chasing menus around with the
mouse.
What is worse, I am terribly clumsy at the mouse. Say I want to
resize a window. There is a corner with three buttons, one for
hiding the window, one to enlarge it and one to close it. Whenever
I want to click either of them, I run the risk of clicking the
wrong one altogether! This happens everywhere that there are a few
buttons all together, say, in the browser, when I want to select a
tab I often end up closing it! I hate that I have to drag the
pointer around in the touchpad, as it takes forever and often lands
in the wrong place, as I just mentioned.
On the other hand, using the keyboard is not always exempt from
these kind of mistakes. It happens to me a lot in Emacs. Sometimes
I accidentally press a keybinding that does something wholly
unexpected, by my clumsy fingers made all the more shaky by so many
cups of coffee. Add to that the fact that Emacs has hundreds of
keybindings that I don't even know of, and each mode has it's own
set of keybindings. That's another source of friction I have with
Emacs. Alright, cool, there is org-mode, and paredit, hyperbole, a
crapload of modes, not to mention all those that compete with each
other providing similar functionality through very different
mechanisms and keybindings. A look at any of them reveals a
shitload of documentation I ought to swallow. A survey of the
current mode (C-h m) provides me with a huuuge list of keybindings,
half of them which come from already existing modes, and a crapload
of text which I have never really cared to pay attention to....
Excellent ingredients for mental overload.
I don't get the same experience with vi(m). Sure, vim has a lot of
functionality that I haven't looked into, and I haven't really
spent much time in the help section of vim, which I don't know how
to navigate anyway. But with vi-style editors things are a lot
easier. You have a set of standard keybindings that work across the
board and that give a set of essential funcitonality which works
for most if not all editing tasks. Sure, sometimes I have to make a
macro on the fly, when I have a task for which a single key ought
to do the work but there isn't any built-in to my knowledge.
Sometimes it takes some time to get it right, but at any time I
feel I am in control of things, instead of feeling bewildering by
an ever-changing beast of hidden functionality.
I'm making a lot of noise about stuff that I don't even use
anymore. I guess the only really relevant concern I still face is
the annoyance I get from having to drag the pointer around the
screen and to keep missing the right button.
Sometimes I feel like going back to the days of being interested in
computers enough to stay focused and writing scripts and code to
perform interesting tasks. Maybe I should, maybe I will, hard to
tell.