I find myself wondering how much difference the feeling of speed makes for creating a "flow" state. It may be physically faster to achieve a task, but if there's a minor context switch between "thinking about what to do" and "mousing around to do it" that doesn't happen with the keyboard, with a corresponding context switch back to thinking about the actual task that all this moving the cursor around is part of... how much time do those cost?
How much of one's internal working memory has to be flushed of the image of what you're trying to create, so that you can visually process mousing through menus much more densely packed than anything back in 1989 when Tog wrote that reply?
Great point on the context switching. It made me think about how I've setup my keyboard and use my editor.
I always opt for a compact numpad-less keyboard with a trackpad right next to it. I like to have the trackpad as close to the keyboard as possible.
I'm a vim user, and what this means is that while I mostly use the keyboard, I can quickly switch over to the trackpad as an auxiliary input for certain movements.
I know the common refrain with vim is to learn how to do things without the mouse... and I certainly can do that pretty effectively. But after over 10 years of vim, I find that using a little bit of trackpad can actually save a lot of time.
How much of one's internal working memory has to be flushed of the image of what you're trying to create, so that you can visually process mousing through menus much more densely packed than anything back in 1989 when Tog wrote that reply?