> You still didn't provide any kind of evidence that editing with mouse is faster than using pure-keyboard interface.
How about the direction of computer history? Vi was superseded by Apple Writer (and other editors, some of them better) that supported the existence of control characters, those editors were superseded by editors that supported mice, and those editors have in turn been improved on to the present day. Do you really think this was all homage to empty fashion, and that modern editors require more work than vi/vim?
Apart from that, it's been proven over and over again that pointing devices improve the efficiency of text editing, compared to an editor that only has control characters to guide the process, and much less so for editors like vi/vim that don't have the advantage of control characters.
* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
End quote (BTW the above is a famous quote by a friend of mine from the early Apple days).
Remember that the above comparison, and all modern comparisons, only compare mouse-dominated use with keyboard-only use for keyboards having control characters -- none of them take on the added burden of vi/vim's modes, which result from the absence of control characters on early keyboards.
> I'm less amused by your mistaken beliefs ...
I just proved that my views aren't beliefs, they're backed up by research, and they are not mistaken. You are not arguing in good faith -- you have no evidence for your position, but you have strong feelings. Not a situation conducive to generating light, as opposed to heat.
I'm going to take the bait one more time. That's not research - it's someone talking about research in the abstract. There are no details but it's clear from the context that they're talking about something completely different.
"In the early (pre-release) days of Lisa, we had command keys instead of pull-down menus. One of the primary reasons we abandoned command keys was the difficulty of coming up with fixed definitions that could be easily transported from application to application. Users were constantly confused."
"It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press."
No, it doesn't. When my cursor is on a function name I want to change in vim, I type 'ciw' and then word is gone and I'm in insert mode replacing it. There's no 2 seconds about it.
Your research doesn't apply to this scenario and you know it. But it's fine - you do it your way, we'll do it ours. There's no problem with that.
Yeah, I seriously given up when I saw the "appeal to authority" of $50 million. I mean, how is this:
> We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface.
Relevant to anything? I'm supposed to feel intimidated by a heap of dollars, right?
Where are the exact experiments described and results presented? Where is the paper with all of these details? I searched the web, but I couldn't find it. Perhaps I need to pay some $.
There's a commentary on this piece by Jeff Atwood, which points out the fact that the article is seriously old and that understanding of the issue has changed in the meantime. I can't say for sure, but from what little info there is in the article it seems that way - I'm not going to argue that there are efficient mouse-centric interfaces being designed and used or that the mouse should never be used as an input device. What I'm saying is that there is a least one keyboard based interface for text editing which is more efficient than equivalent mouse based interfaces - for the most part. I admit that there may be some tasks easier to accomplish with mouse (although we didn't see them yet), but that doesn't invalidate my argument, especially because if they exist, then Vim allows for mouse usage to do them.
The AskTog article is linked to from a page on Plan9 editor, Acme - it's another piece which uses ancient version of vi for comparison. It's so frustrating to see people completely ignore all the development in the Vim interface because it's early versions were much worse. And they are prominent people in our industry, too. It's just sad.
I now have some idea about what makes editing efficient. I may even create the next AppleWriter, although I think Chris Granger already does a good enough job. Almost nothing lutusp said turned out to be true, but the thinking I put into this discussion let me realize some important things about editing. So, on the whole, I don't think I wasted this time.
However, any more than this I feel would be a waste.
How about the direction of computer history? Vi was superseded by Apple Writer (and other editors, some of them better) that supported the existence of control characters, those editors were superseded by editors that supported mice, and those editors have in turn been improved on to the present day. Do you really think this was all homage to empty fashion, and that modern editors require more work than vi/vim?
Apart from that, it's been proven over and over again that pointing devices improve the efficiency of text editing, compared to an editor that only has control characters to guide the process, and much less so for editors like vi/vim that don't have the advantage of control characters.
Reference: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Quote:
* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
End quote (BTW the above is a famous quote by a friend of mine from the early Apple days).
Remember that the above comparison, and all modern comparisons, only compare mouse-dominated use with keyboard-only use for keyboards having control characters -- none of them take on the added burden of vi/vim's modes, which result from the absence of control characters on early keyboards.
> I'm less amused by your mistaken beliefs ...
I just proved that my views aren't beliefs, they're backed up by research, and they are not mistaken. You are not arguing in good faith -- you have no evidence for your position, but you have strong feelings. Not a situation conducive to generating light, as opposed to heat.