Do not be disappointed (post #13)
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Maybe someone can make the trackpoint work passably as a mouse. I’ve never met them.
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I am moving to spacemacs as my desktop environment because my repetitive stress injuries are mouse-related. More use = less pain, so there’s that incentive.
I am in my '60s and stopped using windows five years ago. The only potential problems I have had with Ubuntu have come from dumb-downing down the GUI so as not scare users, to the point where you have to use the command-line to do things you used to be able to do in the GUI.
The only other strong annoyance is the GUI package manager. I don’t think it’s just Ubuntu’s. As a class of application they used to be no worse than any other network application. I use apt instead. But most users will just sit there and wait, MS has them well-trained.
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It depends on what for. I use the trackpoint most of the time (and emacs, which I’ve been using since 1981) but switch to a standard mouse a couple of times a year when some game really requires it. For everyday work I’d much rather keep my hands on my keyboard.
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Thank you for pointing that out. (Discourse makes Ctrl+F hard, and I did a quick visual scan of the comments but missed that.)
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Meet me! I use the built-in one on a ThinkPad and (ok everybody, pitchforks out) use a USB TrackPoint keyboard on a Mac.
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It bugs the HECK outta me that web pages are allowed to capture what should be application shortcuts. I’m firmly in the belief that browsers should handle all keyboard inputs as an application FIRST, and if still unconsumed by the browser itself pass them to the webpage’s javascript engine second.
I haven’t taken the jump to using Vimium in my browser, but it’s been immensely helpful adding VIM keybindings to my tcsh shells.
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This approach makes sense for switch-button controllable applications - where things are oriented to symbolic controls - word processing, code editors etc. I think the awkwardness of translating a cursor across random amounts of screenspace to perform x-y-z click is as much due to the arbitrainess of the time needed to perform the gesture as it is the time interval itself - the unpredictability precludes establishing any sort of rhythm.
A similar/corollary coordination-cost appears in spatially focused applications where the mouse is naturally the central mode of interaction - i.e. graphics software, CAD etc. - and reaching over to the keyboard for shortcuts is interruptive. I’ve had good results tackling this issue for my workflow by mapping a gaming mouses copious side-button array to the most used shortcuts, ctrl-c/v/z etc. and setup program-aware autohotkey scripts for more app-specific functions.
It was one of the reasons I couldn’t switch to a Mac. I was too reliant on Alt-letter keyboard shortcuts for most apps, which still work in lots of apps: I still use it to access menu items which means anything I do frequently I start to build a muscle-memory for the shortcuts.
In my browser I’ll hit Alt and see the menu bar, hit a letter to show a menu (T for Tools), and hit the underlined letter for the menu item (S for Settings) I want. Next time I’ll just remember Alt-T-S gives me the settings page in Firefox.
The Office Ribbon and shortcut labels (they are there!) appears too slowly for this to work for me to develop a muscle memory, and since I have a touch screen, I’ll just raise my finger to tap.
Keyboard shortcuts are essential for people with disabilities, which the original Alt- menu system was designed for (including Alt-Space for window management), but we’re losing it.
It’s appalling that after two decades of web browsers there is still no one-step keyboard shortcut to put the focus on the tab bar, or to bring up the tab right-click menu in a browser. Something so frequently used, and I must reach for the mouse.
I look it up every few months. Hoping someone thought to put one in.
Learning curves = costs for many people who don’t have tons of free time on their hands, so for example people who work a couple jobs or long hours, or get stuck with more than their share of unpaid tasks. Or people who have time, but have to share the computer with others. So Veronica’s suggestion is pertinent and helpful.
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I love my nipple mouse. AND the forward/back buttons above the cursor arrows on thinkpads of a certain vintage. All keyboards should have those
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You should have used Sjveikist compliance and submitted it as an epub compressed in a .RAR file.
(Ooops. Was meant to be a reply to @Woodchuck45 )
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Everyone familiar with vim navigation should definitely do this. It is really hard to go back to mouse usage once you’ve made the switch.
I guess my other argument against most people trying to go mouseless for most of their work is that most people don’t actually type that well. If you are pair programming with someone and then you have to wait 5 seconds for them to find the “<” key, rather than it being auto-suggested by a modern IDE, it can be really irritating.
F6; ohh, tab bar. ctrl-tab will cycle through them…
A lot of keyboards have a dedicated key for this, but try shift-F10.
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It’s kind of shocking how universal yet unknown this one is. Works on Linux, Mac (if you have F-keys) and Windows going back to Win 95.
edit: Oops, not a Mac thing. It just happened to be implemented in the one application I tried.
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I just have to say, you people are VERY geeky, and I love you for it. Looks like everyone is finding things that work for them, and that’s always good to hear. What would irritate is if there was only one method for everything and no way for us to customize or utilize alternate operating systems and methodologies.
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I have my wife’s old Chromebook that I installed ArchLinux ARM on: it is a physically light laptop, great battery life (still), nothing important on it so I would take it with me across international borders.
The April 2020 kernel update broke it badly enough that I and others couldn’t get any X windows to function properly on it, so now I have a laptop that just runs on the command line. Battery life is now even more phenomenal. I use it if I need to focus on writing: I just scp the text file to my daily driver when I am done. I use w3m on it to read boingboing. Also, ASCIIquarium is pretty awesome.
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That’s a lie. EMACS is not ideal for anything 
vi user since 1980
