I would agree in that much more of my time is spent dealing with office distractions than reaching for the mouse. In fact, the time I spend checking email and my own site from work is often when the office is too noisy to focus on more complex tasks. In other cases, I simply need to take a break from the problem I am working on so that I can return with a clear head. Thankfully, my employer encourages us to spend time on building online and community presence. I have this to thank for much of my personal success.

This is not even touching on how your statement completely ignores the concept of flow. Productivity in programming is not linear with time. Interface hindrances have a huge cost in terms of breaking flow.

I notice that you’re all reading a website during office hours?

How does time lost surfing the web, reading personal email, getting a coffee, chatting with you co-workers, completing the latest pointless exercise from HR etc. stack up against taking your hand of the keyboard to use the mouse?

Fan-Fucking-Tastic.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by martani_net: RT @rickasaurus: Blogged: Code Bubbles and the Keyboard http://bit.ly/9VjPPm...

an integrated pointing keyboard has the pointing performance of an optical mouse and has a scroll wheel.

with an integrated pointing keyboard the typist never has to take one’s fingers off the home row.

from the home row the typist has total control of the computer screens.

one can point, type, click, scroll with a scroll wheel, backspace, del, and esc in any order all from the home row.

i use icon macros for special key combinations. i just point and click. no ctl-…

from my phd research on advanced input devices, one wastes about 5 minutes per hour repeatedly going from keyboard to mouse.

40 minutes wasted per day times your hourly wage =

say that 40 minutes is worth $10 per day.

10 x 200 days working per year = $2000 wasted by using a mouse.

i use my patent pending integrated pointing keyboard everyday for trading stocks.

from the “father of the perfect keyboard”.

twittering as stocktradr

In eclipse, I made hundreds of bookmarks, and a scheme to allow myself to fluidly move around the files with keyboard shortcuts, but I was defining my own system, abusing something designed for something else.

I hope this comes around, I will write something up for emacs and see if I can use an ipad to simulate a nice environment for this.

That’s funny because at that point, all of a sudden, it starts looking like emacs all over again.

I gotta say, watching that video made me get flutters and that is saying something given that I’m a jaded ol’ fogey. But I agree with your point about keyboard speed entirely. And what it all comes down to is simply knowing your key chords, and if you get to that point, there is nothing under the sun that is more powerful than something like emacs…

It’s not so much about a drop in wpm, but instead a drop in concentration. I think the cache miss analogy is appropriate. I don’t actively avoid using the mouse but in situations when I need to continually switch back and forth my mind tends to wander.

That said, I think Code Bubbles looks great and I can’t wait to try it for myself.

However, most of my work is related to image processing and is usually in rather verbose languages (C++ or C#). My bottleneck when writing code is usually how fast I can type the language’s inane syntax. However, once I start writing, I’ve already spent a lot of time planning.

I don’t know about you, but I consider thinking and writing code to be two separate processes with different bottlenecks. I would think those doing a significant amount of algorithmic programming would need a similar separation of processes.