How hard is it to "go mouseless" with your personal computer?

I first learned to use emacs back in about 1985. I am still learning new things. Some of those new things may well have existed back in 1985. If I switched from emacs to something else, I would reach my current level of expertise in 2057, when I would be 101, all other things being equal. By then I will probably be editing my own DNA as a major mode, so I get the time to learn the rest. I would probably not make the same choices if I was starting again as a young programmer.

6 Likes

6 Likes

Had a math teacher in college who only used Lynx. He also used fedora in terminal mode, and had us submit our math homework in LaTeX via an SVN server he had setup on the class network.

11 Likes

This I’m all in favor of. Fuck git.

3 Likes

AwesomeWM and a pool cue controller, or eye operated cursor if y’all like.
Maybe make a BEM trackball controller if not SpaceTrack (no, looks like 3DConnexion Space Mouse is what it’s called) force-actuated cursor.
To be fair, the keyboard still has a formfactor, so you could either use a laser mouse module to use the keyboard to scroll in the virtual screen or use its scrollwheel to do that in a limited fashion, then use mousey relative movement to pick 20s of recent browser tabs…

4 Likes

Have you tried alt-select? Mind blown!

1 Like

You’ve been brainwashed by staying in a UX-free world. Most modern tools are orders of magnitude easier to learn than vim or emacs. Those old school tools rather intentionally throw away any attempt at approachability, user-discovery, or self-documentation in pursuit of ultimate feature sets. You can become an expert with any modern IDE like Rider or Xcode because they are engineered to be easy to learn. That’s a huge difference. In my experience working with vim and emacs snobs, their attitude is all sunk cost fallacy. They don’t want to learn anything new because it would seemingly devalue the time they spent becoming an expert is this crusty old thing.

12 Likes

Git was a few years off yet.

2 Likes

It used to be easier on Windows - you could tab your way around, press Alt or F10 to bring up menus, and you’re good. The Office Fluent toolbar does not work well that way. Yes you can get to all the controls with the keyboard, but it’s not fast or intuitive.

The web also made things worse, as the “first” field for data entry might be 27 items down in the tab list.

6 Likes

The only reason I recommend to anybody that they learn vi is that it is almost always already there. If you get stuck on a new *nix computer and have to perform some task vi is a better default to use than ed and knowing the commands already is a lot better than having to look them up and being totally unfamiliar with mode based editing.

7 Likes

Renoise is the Emacs of DAWs.

2 Likes

It’s easy in Linux - just don’t ever start a window manager.
We old folks worked keyboards-only for decades before the mouse came along. It works Just Fine.
You can use nano or any more capable editor. Nano’s learning curve is very short.

11 Likes

Maybe I am brainwashed and used conditioner too, but I can still see ‘emacs’ is clunky and idiosyncratic. I liked the MS and Mac CodeForge (?) editing tools. But I work on Linux, Mac, and Windows machines, and I use a whole bunch of different languages; and I can get the same look and feel everywhere. My fingers and brain are wired around emacs, and I probably have too few productive years left to be worth an upgrade. If you are younger, then by all means learn something better and friendlier. Which I more or less said in my post.

I started on punched cards in the sixties. Then went to ‘edlin’ (ugh) and tape punches. Then years of using ‘ked’ and variants on PDP-11s. And then UNIX V4, and ‘emacs’, and for whatever reasons I stuck there. So, it was good enough for me.

8 Likes

I do love keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible, though I’ll never be mouse free (nor would I really want to… too convenient for so many things). But ALT commands are something I learned decades ago and they have thankfully carried over through various Windows iterations. ALT-TAB alone is worth its weight in gold.

4 Likes

I have started to use StrokesPlus.net to replace some of my often used keyboard shortcuts (copy/paste, minimize, throw a window on the other monitor, switch tabs in the browser…)

I find it actually so quick for repetitive testing tasks when all I need is alt-tab and a couple mouse strokes to blow through a whole bunch of scenarios.

Haven’t even started to even use a small amount of the super advanced scripting that software will let you do, it’s intimidating how much it has potential for!

tldr: I’ll keep my mouse, thanks :grin:

1 Like

Sounds pretty fragile. I’ve tried recompiling stuff from arxiv.org, so as to avoid fuzzy type. it’s not straightforward.

2 Likes

as someone who has to deal with “lab”/“operational” boxes (and now, increasingly VMs) which don’t have much fluff installed for security reasons, vi was/vim is everywhere.

But I concede that my needs aren’t the norm.

2 Likes

Prof probably just read the LaTeX directly rather than ever trying to print it out. It’s a way to get the formulas out in ascii text more than anything.

5 Likes

when they can just pull up eclipse and know how to do it already.

… and waste time mousing and mousing and mousing and mousing …

an actual learning curve

My god, are we afraid of learning curves now?

 

You can become an expert with any modern IDE like Rider or Xcode because they are engineered to be easy to learn.

That they are easy to learn is an irrelevant strawman. I’m extremely proficient in emacs, and I’d be hard-pressed to understand why I would expend the energy to learn another IDE when it’s unlikely there would be no gain in my productivity over my current workflow.

3 Likes