This post and thread are terrific, and the day I learned common Emacs bindings work in most corners of macOS was momentous, but…
Whenever advanced keyboard shortcuts are under discussion, I’m reminded of something I read, I think by Bruce Tognazzini, on an early Apple study of keyboard vs. mouse. They had set up the usual usability test—run through these common spreadsheet tasks or whatever—and compared skilled users exclusively on mouse with equally skilled users issuing keyboard commands via shortcut. Maybe they swapped them back and forth on the modes, I don’t recall.
When the experiment was over, the mouse and keyboard users agreed: Shortcuts were faster, switching hands to the mouse and issuing commands via the cursor was slower. But the actual measured results showed no significant difference. Tog speculated that there’s some deep perceptual circuitry that’s tuned to notice the cost of mode-switching but submerge into the subconscious the cost of recall.
EDIT: I'm sure he's referenced it a dozen times in a dozen places, but here's a version of Tog's analysis that's roughly what I remember:
We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
I don't think this proves anything. For example there is a massive difference between people using shortcuts in an everyday application, people used to Vim/Emacs/whatever to a point they can do the basics without thinking about them, and people who actually customized their setup for their workflow.
And to me it looks like they only focused on the first case because of sentences like this:
> It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press
Yes, I can definitely believe that I wouldn't be faster than a mouse user if I had to select text with a keyboard in notepad or press Ctrl-Alt-whatever to do simple tasks. But good luck beating a proficient Vim user at anything that has to do with cursor movements, search/replace or repetitive steps - watch a competitive coder use Vim and see how often it takes them "two seconds to decide" to do anything.
I think overall people have a decent intuition about what the more efficient way to control an application is. I frequently use the mouse/touchpad too, because in many GUIs it's simply faster and you can feel that even when you start out focused on the keyboard. Often users switch between window management and using graphical applications, and in those cases leaving the hand on the mouse is the more convenient approach.
And lastly - does it even matter? When someone perceives a certain approach to be faster or smoother, then why not let them? In almost all cases the speed difference doesn't matter.
I can imagine that moving the mouse to open an app from the macOS dock is about the same speed as using the Cmd+Space or some shortcut.
I can't imagine using the mouse to go to the start/end of line is quicker than using an easy to reach keyboard shortcut to do so.
I'd also wonder about differences in general computing literacy/etc. between 1989 and now. -- I'm not sure "people new to the mouse" describes a meaningful subset of professional computer users these days.
Whenever advanced keyboard shortcuts are under discussion, I’m reminded of something I read, I think by Bruce Tognazzini, on an early Apple study of keyboard vs. mouse. They had set up the usual usability test—run through these common spreadsheet tasks or whatever—and compared skilled users exclusively on mouse with equally skilled users issuing keyboard commands via shortcut. Maybe they swapped them back and forth on the modes, I don’t recall.
When the experiment was over, the mouse and keyboard users agreed: Shortcuts were faster, switching hands to the mouse and issuing commands via the cursor was slower. But the actual measured results showed no significant difference. Tog speculated that there’s some deep perceptual circuitry that’s tuned to notice the cost of mode-switching but submerge into the subconscious the cost of recall.
EDIT: I'm sure he's referenced it a dozen times in a dozen places, but here's a version of Tog's analysis that's roughly what I remember:
https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.