[dartos]

Touchpads don’t solve for muscle memory for the same reasons mouses don’t.

And yeah, of course. Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around. In vim, for example, there are many more text-centric ways of moving around a document.

Using a keyboard is generally much faster. Try using your daily code editor without any hot keys at all. No F5, no Ctrl-s, none of that.

[jorvi]

> Touchpads don’t solve for muscle memory for the same reasons mouses don’t.

Uh, what? I have my touchpad tuned so that one swipe from top left to bottom right is exactly equal to going from the top left to bottom right of my display. And aside from that, how do you think people play FPS games, that they think about every mouse movement and then do it?

> Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around.

> Try using your daily code editor

One of the few usecases where you can do that, and in general is extremely heavily biased towards keyboard use.

Having a touchpad or mouse is great because it is adaptable and versatile. It doesn’t require the application developer to have accommodated every step a keyboard user wants to optimize for. Not to mention there is no “quickly” using your keyboard with one hand if you constantly need to hold modifier keys :)

> Using a keyboard is generally much faster.

That was my point, it is until it isn’t. On any application without Vim or EMacs bindings I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there, going taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap with horrid inefficiency.

[skydhash]

> I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there

I’d be doing search and land exactly where I need to be. For each important operation, there’s always a more efficient operations as shortcuts are composable in a way pointing is not.

[dartos]

> Uh, what? I have my touchpad tuned so that one swipe from top left to bottom right is exactly equal to going from the top left to bottom right of my display. And aside from that, how do you think people play FPS games, that they think about every mouse movement and then do it?

I think that FPS players are conscious of where they are aiming. They don’t just automatically move their mouse in the exact same way to hit every enemy on screen.

There may be some specific movements, like swiping or turning 180 degrees which have a specific motion (or gesture) related to it, but that isn’t the same as aiming, which you can’t memorize as where you aim is different every time depending on your targets position and movement.

> Not to mention there is no “quickly” using your keyboard with one hand if you constantly need to hold modifier keys :)

Yes there is :)

> On any application without Vim or EMacs bindings I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there.

I’m sorry, but this is a bad argument. Obviously is software isn’t made to support keyboard centric use, it will not be great to use it only with a keyboard.

Imagine if you were writing a book, but your software wasn’t made with keyboard support. You’d need to use the mouse to click every letter. Or one where each clickable button is buried in >3 layers of dropdown menus. That would be equally terrible.

If you have an application optimized for keyboard interaction, it will be faster (tho less intuitive) to interact with it than one which is optimized for mouse movements.

There is a good compromise between speed of use and intuitive usability which is mouse-centric with hot keys.

But to interact as quickly as possible, you’d want to stick with one consistent input device, and motion based input devices don’t cut it.

I mean use what you want though. If you like using a mouse, use it.