This recent development of the thread leads me to these conclusions and conjectures. * If you want to demonstrate the mouse to be faster than the keyboard, you can contrive an experiment to do so. Example: Randomize occurences of X's in a text, ask to replace them by Y's, but make sure there is no find-replace command or wizard to help. * If you want to demonstrate the keyboard to be faster than the mouse, you can contrive an experiment to do so. Example: Ask to crack open your favourite Haskell textbook and enter it into the computer. Some of us raise that speed is not the only concern. Indeed, cognitive switch may be more taxing on the worker. However, going on a limb, I'm going to wager that: * If you want to demonstrate the mouse to be less taxing than the keyboard, you can probably contrive an experiment to do so. * If you want to demonstrate the keyboard to be less taxing than the mouse, you can probably contrive an experiment to do so. The keyboard-mouse duality (duelity?) doesn't end here. Some of us explains that keyboarding has become part of our motor skill, and mousing has not quite. So I ask, are there also people who are the opposite? One year I went to COMDEX Canada (in Toronto) and saw a live demo of Photoshop or something. The demonstrator was amazing. He clicked through the menu system faster than I could watch! He performed long sequences of back-to-back menu mousing at a sustained speed paralleling that of my keyboarding. You may say "aha, Photoshop, analog!" but no, in his demo analog operations were the minority, the majority was on the discrete menus - I do mean it when I say long sequences of back-to-back menu mousing. A possible objection would be that he practiced on his demo. But I do invite you to observe someone who uses Photoshop or the like professionally; you may see a level of mouse-fu you never thought possible. But all this musing on HCI and HCI research may all be just talking wind because: Michael T. Richter wrote:
All this talk about "efficiency" while editing text would make me believe that most of my time spend writing software is typing. Yet, oddly enough, I find that the typing is the *least* of my tasks. Most of my work is done in my head, on whiteboards or on scraps of paper long before my fingers stroke a keyboard.
Conventional wisdom would say: Then the priority is on improving the head, the whiteboard, and the paper. Give secondary priority to HCI and IDE dreams.