On Thu, 11 Jul 2013 09:45:33 -0400, Roy Smith wrote: > In article <2fdf282e-fd28-4ba3-8c83-aaaace120...@googlegroups.com>, > jus...@zeusedit.com wrote: > >> On Wednesday, July 10, 2013 2:17:12 PM UTC+10, Xue Fuqiao wrote: >> >> > * It is especially handy for selecting and deleting text. >> >> When coding I never use a mouse to select text regions or to delete >> text. >> >> These operations I do using just the keyboard. > > For good typists, there is high overhead to getting your hands oriented > on the keyboard (that's why the F and J keys have little bumps). So, > any time you move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, you pay a > price. > > The worst thing is to constantly be alternating between mouse actions > and keyboard actions. You spend all your time getting your fingers > hands re-oriented. That's slow.
Big deal. I am utterly unconvinced that raw typing speed is even close to a bottleneck when programming. Data entry and transcribing from (say) dictated text, yes. Coding, not unless you are a one-fingered hunt-and- peek typist. The bottleneck is not typing speed but thinking speed: thinking about program design and APIs, thinking about data structures and algorithms, debugging, etc. Programming is normally done in spurts of typing followed by longer periods of thinking, testing, debugging. Micro-optimizing for the fraction of a second it takes to re-orient your hand on the keyboard is silly -- even if it is an optimization, not a pessimization (and I remain unconvinced) -- it's utterly trivial. Who cares that you saved 0.1 of a second by not moving your hand off the keyboard when you then sit there for 20 minutes staring into space thinking about your program design? Keyboard commands for yanking an entire line beat the mouse, but for moving the cursor around to arbitrary positions, or copying arbitrary pieces of text, a mouse is much faster. But either way, who cares? Typing speed is only rarely the bottleneck, let alone micro-optimizations like these. The difference between a 60 wpm typist and a 90 wpm typist is normally that the 90 wpm typist can introduce bugs 50% faster :-) I'm joking, of course, but typing *accuracy* is far more important than typing speed. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list