Ketil Malde wrote:
On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 10:19 +0200, apfelmus wrote:
http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
It adresses the question whether selecting commands in menus with the mouse or accessing them via keyboard shortcuts is faster. The answer is:
"* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding."
Interesting! I did a quick test doing search and replace using the keyboard and the menus in Emacs. It takes me about six seconds with the keyboard, and closer to ten using the menus. (The first time, it took thirty as I spent time to locate the correct menu options :-)
But I agree with the report that using the mouse *feels* a lot slower. Quoting the report: "It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function." I'm not so sure I agree, using the mouse feels way more abrupt and intrusive.
The question is whether the stopwatch feels the same way :)
I can do M-x repl TAB str TAB foo RET bar RET with my eyes closed¹, but to use the mouse, I need to locate the mouse with my hand, locate the mouse cursor, locate the menu, etc etc.
Note that "locate the menu" is indeed something may take more time than it should. Traditionally, Mac OS features a single menu bar at the top of the screen as opposed to Windows or GNOME. This is a consious design choice whose rationale is explained at http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html In short, Fitt's Law says that the amount of time to navigate to a target on screen depends logarithmically on the ratio (size of target / distance to target). Now, a menu bar at the top of the screen has effectively infinite target size, you can just throw your mouse pointer to the top of the screen and be assured that it hits the top edge = the target. This is much faster than targetting a small menu attached to a window. And it has the additional side effect that the task "locate the mouse pointer" can be partially omitted because only the horizontal position matters if you're going to throw the pointer to the top of the screen anyway. Regards, apfelmus