I'm in the process of learning to do everything I do on the computer without touching my mouse.
Why?
Well, it's very simple. For the sake of argument, let's say you can move your hand to your mouse in one second, use the mouse in one second, and then return your hand to the keyboard in one second (I think these are pretty optimistic numbers, but let's work with them anyway). Now, let's say (very conservatively) that I can type at 60wpm. That's one word per second. One word is 8 characters. Let's assume that I'm going to be using godawful complex multicharacter keystroke combinations and they take about 8 characters worth of time to punch in. That means that I finish my command in the time it would have taken me to seek my hand to the mouse.
Now, this time savings is neat, but what's more significant is that it seems to keep my mind much more focused on what I'm doing. It keeps the mental flow of writing code from becoming interrupted. I get into writing code faster and stay focused longer.
There are (of course) many situations where a mouse is a vastly superior input device. Typically situations where you are interacting with data presented in a broad 2d or 3d manner (e.g. Photoshop, 3DSMax, and Quake3A) need a mouse as input, but in these situations you tend to see people with one hand that stays on the mouse and one hand that stays on the keyboard.
I suppose the code analogy here is to batch your processing. If you sort your data so that large groups of things process through the same chunks of code you get fewer cache misses and your processor doesn't mispredict the branches, thus leading to higher performance.
Kudos to you!!
I've learned quite a bit of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows and I've impressed some people at how little I'll touch the mouse. Even using the keyboard to navigate the Start menu seems to make things speedier.
Posted by: Christian at July 30, 2003 12:01 PM