You talk about web browsing with a mouse. I can’t stand to use a mouse for web browsing. Whenever I use a computer without pentadactyl, Firefox feels so foreign. I find myself typing the keyboard shortcuts anyhow, and then getting a bit frustrated when it doesn’t do anything. Anyhow, to me, mice are almost entirely useless, and have set computing back (for the most part). I am much more productive with vim than when I try to use Word, which is painful. The tone (or mood, or whatever) of this article makes it sound like you like the mouse. Whether that is true or not (based on other articles, it probably isn’t) I disagree with it. There are sometimes when I don’t even touch my mouse the whole day, and those days are, by far the most productive.

Anyhow, great article, I enjoyed learning about the history. It was interesting!

Can’t recall what I actually meant to post… but the “Name” field here hates quotes, and keeps escaping them, and eating my posts & reloading instead of posting. I is sad panda. :(

On one hand, without some kind of 2D input, CAD never would have taken off. (Srsly, just TRY to do all that shit in your head and key in the coordinates…) On the other hand, that’s what I do for a living, and I use an Intuos tablet. :P

Thanks for the history lesson. Researching all of that and getting it right is probably the hardest part of writing these kinds of essays.

Despite being a Pentadactyl user, I have a mouse gesture add-on installed and I often use the mouse exclusively when casually browsing (reddit). However, when I’m being productive (i.e. in Emacs) I hardly touch the mouse. I’ve got Openbox decked out in keybindings for those occasions I need to interact with things outside of Emacs, so that I don’t need to touch the mouse.

Great article again. Good job. I remembering saying something like this on one of your previous posts, but I’ll say it again: I want to see more “pro” computing devices and interfaces. I want to see someone really break away from the keyboard/mouse paradigm and invent something that’s custom for a certain type of work. Let’s start with some sort of IDE. Programmers usually do three things: write code, compile it, run it. There are some additionals: running a debugger or some sort of analysis tool, navigating documentation and source trees. Maybe we can take ideas like the Light Table IDE and use it as the basis of a new generation of IDEs that isn’t just Eclipse++ or Vim++. Both of those are good tools, but we can do better.