Author Topic: [slashdot] 'I Stopped Using a Computer Mouse For a Week and It Was Amazing'  (Read 3780 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline _GMK_

  • not affiliated with GMK
  • Thread Starter
  • Posts: 197
"Over the course of the next five days, I relied solely on my keyboard to navigate the web and my local hard drive. It was a limited form of digital detox, a way of trying to understand the way people used computers before the computer mouse became widely adopted for commercial machines in the 1980s. If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was ****ing fantastic. It took about a day and a half before I had memorized all the shortcuts that I would be using on a regular basis. All the other important shortcuts I wrote down on a notepad I kept on my desk for reference. I also had to do a little set up for certain applications, such as Gmail, which doesn't have many of its most useful shortcuts turned on by default, such as the ability to select all unread messages or the ability to move between messages with only a single keystroke.

By the end of my week without a mouse, many of the shortcuts were already beginning to feel like second nature. I found that they saved me a ton of time, especially on tedious tasks like deleting emails. Indeed, one shortcut evangelist suggests that switching to keyboard shortcuts in Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year. If nothing else, it made the experience of using a laptop way less miserable because I didn't have to touch the touchpad. [...] Admittedly, not everything was rosy without a mouse. I haunt a number of forums and found it a little tedious to have to ctrl+f whatever item I wanted to "click" on. Similarly, doing anything that involved image editing in Photoshop was basically impossible. I don't game on my PC, but from what I hear, this would also be quite difficult without a mouse."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/01/25/006216/i-stopped-using-a-computer-mouse-for-a-week-and-it-was-amazing

Offline Coreda

  • Posts: 776
They'd appreciate spacial navigation. Opera classic and now Vivaldi offer it. You can navigate links in the order they appear visually on screen, moving left/right/up/down from link to link using the arrow keys and a modifier (or whatever hotkey you've configured).

211345-0

Also native Windows tip that I use all the time: pinned applications in the taskbar can be toggled (minimized/restored) using the Win key plus the 1-9 keys (representing the first 9 pinned programs). Eg: if your browser is the first pinned program it would be Win+1.
« Last Edit: Fri, 25 January 2019, 02:28:33 by Coreda »

Offline Findecanor

  • Posts: 5036
  • Location: Koriko
Meanwhile in the Unix/Linux world, keyboard usage to navigate GUI has largely regressed.

Offline figit090

  • Posts: 47
  • RGB LED Kinesis Contoured
That's cool! Having a desk computer job, I've learned a lot more shortcuts. In the past I've also enjoyed using programs like autohotkey and programmable macros.

I got my workflow down to single keystrokes where they used to be repetitive, complicated combinations.

I've used my Kinesis macros, a Corsair macro keyboard, and a programmable keypad. All were good options.

It's nice to know windows still supports keyboard GUI shortcuts.

Sent from my Moto G (5S) Plus using Tapatalk