On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 4:18 AM, Wolfgang Keller <felip...@gmx.net> wrote: >> > A GUI that can not be used without taking the ten fingers off the >> > keyboard is indeed entirely unusable for any half-proficient >> > screenworker. And anyone doing actual productive screenwork every >> > day for more than just a few months will inevitably (have to) get >> > proficient (unless completely braindead). >> >> My ten fingers stay on my keyboard, which looks somewhat thus: >> >> http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/mobile/lenovo-thinkpad-t61/keyboard.jpg >> >> See the red dot in the middle? Mouse. > > I didn't mean "trackpoints" or similar devices, but full keyboard > "navigation" of the entire GUI through shortcuts etc. > > A "touch-type" GUI is a "must have" for any application that's supposed > to be used productively. The mouse is nice to "explore" a GUI or for > occasional/leisurely use, but once you use an application daily to earn > your living, it's a hopeless roadblock for productivity.
You have seriously underestimated the power of the combined keyboard+mouse interface. I absolutely agree that keyboard-only will (almost) always beat mouse-only, but keyboard AND mouse together can beat either alone, if the UI is designed correctly. Case in point: Partial staging of a file in git. I can use 'git add -p' or 'git gui'. With the former, it's all keyboard; I can step through the hunks, choose what to stage, move on. With the latter, it's more visual; I right-click a hunk and choose "Stage this hunk" (or "Stage this line", which is actually quite fiddly with 'git add -p'). I am a self-confessed keyboard junkie. I will use the keyboard for pretty much everything. Yet I use git gui and almost never git add -p, the one exception being when I can't use git gui (eg it's not installed on some remote headless system and installing it would require fetching gobs of GUI libraries). It uses the mouse to good result. > As is the "response time" behaviour of "web applications". On a LAN, with a proper back-end, I can get instant response from a web app. Obviously over the internet there's latency, but that's nothing to do with the use of a web browser as a UI; you'll see that with ssh just as much. > "No cursor animation ever" is an absolute "must have" requirement for > productivity applications. Not really. There are times when the human will be legitimately waiting for the computer. http://xkcd.com/303/ for one. But this still has little to do with the use of a web browser UI; I can achieve exactly that with the Yosemite Project, which can actually be a three-computer system: the content is stored on one, the HTTP server is on another, and the web browser is separate again. And this is only a 100Mbit LAN. If you need moar speeeeeeed, you can always demand gigabit or better. >> THIS is a professional programmer's workspace. :) > > And by "screenworkers" I didn't refer to programmers. Those people > rarely have to use the stuff that they implement. Of course not, programmers never use software they've themselves written. Never. Not in a million... oh wait, what's this I have? Hmm, gcc used to compile gcc, RosMud being used by Rosuav, Neil Hodgson using SciTE... naw, they're all statistical anomalies, carry on! You really have a very low opinion of programmers for someone on a programming mailing list :) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
