The Blog of Curtis Chambers

Original post here.

It seems that there’s a lot of active discussion going on about this right now. There’s a new blog by Clay Barnes that seems to be focused solely on this issue, and he’s posted two articles about the mouse’s decline. He also references a couple of great posts by Jeff Atwood (I’m a huge fan of his blog). The first one talks about going commando and weaning yourself off the mouse. I think that’s a great idea and increases productivity by leaps and bounds. As I said in my previous post, I only use the mouse when I absolutely have to. His second post about how Vista makes it easier to find things via the keyboard is good, but I wouldn’t be a true Mac zealot without saying that Microsoft ripped it off from OS X’s Spotlight feature, which was then copied and made better by Quicksilver.

I really like this new trend of research in the keyboard navigation arena. Perhaps the resurgence is due to the old school DOS/UNIX junkies getting nostalgic for the days when all you had was a keyboard. I remember using the a DOS word processor called Textra back in the late 80’s, and it was controlled entirely using the Function keys. F1-F10-F7 saved a document. Each time you pressed a function key it changed the menu options along the bottom of the screen. Pico/nano in UNIX are similar, only they change the menu options along the bottom when using Control-key combinations.

I remember in college I was a total emacs guy, and got very adept at using all the various tools using Control-key combinations. I’m now lazy and use TextMate, but at least it integrates well into the shell and has bundles. I’m really hoping to get deep into vi, but I just haven’t had the time to learn more than the basic shortcuts. Any great tutorials that people can link me to?