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do you guys ever use the mouse?

Comments
  • 2
    Yes, I do. Logitech's free spinning scroll is awesome for long pages. I also play games.

    Otherwise, while coding, I'm keyboard-only like 95% of the time.
  • 1
    I use the mouse to develop my civilisation and spam Elite Huskarls.
  • 4
    I use it pretty often to wake up my PC
  • 1
    Of course i use the mouse a lot.
    If i don't need to do it repeatedly and/or often enough, i just use the mouse - else i use a keyboard shortcut.

    What i really don't get, is the rising popularity of the controller for classic mouse + keyboard use cases...
  • 1
    I unfortunately haven't gotten to the place where I can use my keyboard to it's full potential.
  • 1
    Not for work. I am used to write code on 13 inch laptop. No monitors, no keyboard, no mouse.
  • 1
    @GeorgeBool 14
  • 1
    Programmer use mouse a little bit. But keyboard is mostly use while programming.
  • 2
    @asgs why not use keys for that
  • 0
    @arjun-123 eventually you will
  • 1
    @devout-coder I can. I also use Esc sometimes but I fear that I may close a popup window or something. It just didn't become a habit
  • 1
    @devout-coder Keys are most important for programmers.
  • 1
  • 6
    I was a Vim coder for 15 years.

    Even after 15 years there were a lot of key combos that refused to get into my muscle memory.

    Also, striving for efficiency often resulted in an hour of internet searching for the shortest keystroke combo.

    I now often work on projects which really benefit from more full fledged IDEs (Combination of PHP, Jupyter, Rust, Haskell, SQL, sometimes Kotlin for Minecraft mods)

    I also write less code, spend more time on technical designs and tests.

    Eventually I found that trying to integrate my Vim keybinds into all kinds of other apps ended up being less efficient than the whole "moving hand to mouse takes time" argument.

    Also because you sometimes do reinstalls, and sometimes do pair coding on someone else's machine...

    So these days I'm just going with pretty default settings for everything.

    Jetbrains & VScode muscle memory have replaced my Vim habits, and it's all good.
  • 0
    @bittersweet well thankfully i haven't reached that point
  • 2
    You guys don't use your mouse? I always use an on-screen keyboard. How can you live without a mouse?
  • 0
    @sheev-dev bro everything can be done with a keyboard...there is no real need to use the mouse
  • 3
    Fully agree with @bittersweet was known as the hotkey guy as I know them in vim, Emacs, (file)browsers, various OSes and window managers. Yet even with offset count it is faster to navigate 12 lines down and 8 characters to the right with a simple point and click.
    Common tasks and keyboard navigation is important for productivity especially across multiple files and windows. Point and click however is just as important (how else are we going to place multi carets accurately).
  • 1
    @hjk101 There are ways around to multi carets even with keyboard only - if it's not consecutive lines you have to place carets on, they usually have something in common - either a keyword, an identifier or some punctuation (and if formatted properly you can even rely on indentation) - so you select the first occurrence of what you think should be the same, then proceed to select matches of it according to how your IDE/editor of choice works. I'd argue that hitting a certain key combo repeatedly is almost always more precise than pointing and clicking with the mouse.
  • 1
    @kamen sure you can and by the time you have figured that out I've already pushed a commit.
  • 1
    @hjk101 Nothing much to figure out - I personally see patterns like this right away. It honestly took me 20 times longer to write it than it would take me to do it.
  • 2
    @kamen a sorry thought you where taking about placing the multi carets. Only use that when it's rather hard to do the pattern matching little when a specific part in a mapping.

    Most of the time pattern matching works out fine. I still often select a part so the replace does not accidentally touches correct parts.
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