From Evan Sultanik

Mice==Evil

A lot of people recently have been evangelizing to me the use of cascading windows, specifically in the Windows environment. Normally I'd ignore this, however I have a particular pet peeve in which I can't stand when people claim something as fact that I know is false. Let me make myself clear: the use of mice is less efficient, in most general cases, than a finite (read: keyboard) alternative/equivalent. As a co-worker of mine, Donovan Artz, recently pointed out, 99% of mouse use is actually a negative feedback loop:

1. The brain must identify the area on the screen that needs to be clicked
2. The brain must locate the current position of the mouse pointer on the screen and figure out which way the pointer needs to be moved to get to the area identified in 1
3. The brain tells the hand to move the mouse in the direction determined in 2
4. Repeat 1, 2, and 3 until the brain thinks the mouse pointer is in the correct area
5. The brain tells the hand to click the mouse button
6. The brain must determine if the desired effect actually happened. If not, repeat all of the previous steps over again.

Nearly all of these steps can be eliminated if one simply uses a keyboard shortcut (with a deterministic result). For example, say one has multiple windows open, each partially occluding view of the other, and one wants to change focus from one window to another. One could simply use the mouse to click on the desired window, however this would cause the negative feedback loop outlined above. Most window managers, including Windows and Mac OSX, have a facility to iterate through all of the open windows and choose to give one focus. This is usually bound to a keyboard shortcut like META-TAB. The META-TAB approach is almost as bad as using a mouse, though, because one does not necessarily have control over the order in which the window manager iterates through the windows. Therefore this approach has a worst case complexity of linear time (based upon the number of windows open). What we need is a constant time approach to changing focus between windows.

My solution:

One application per workspace!

I personally use WindowMaker, however I am also fond of other minimalist window managers such as Ion. Basically, I give each of my applications their own workspace:

1. Terminal(s) (konsole)
2. Text Editor (emacs)
3. dvi/pdf/ps viewer (xdvi/acroread/gv)
4. Web Browser (Mozilla)
5. Instant Messager (gaim)
6. Other

I've found that 99% of the time these are the only programs I use. And whenever I open another program that I don't have assigned to a workspace (like gimp or dia) they go in workspace 6. Each of my workspaces is assigned a unique keyboard shortcut so I can immediately jump directly between any two programs. Tabs are also my friends. Problem solved.

Previous: Chancellery

Blog Entries

Next: Restaurants