November
2005
Is the mouse evil?
Can it be that the mouse causes “context switching” (for humans)? Any emacs user (as any gamer) will testify that using those (seemingly frightening) key bindings doesn’t require any “brain cycles” and happens almost automatically. This is why emacs is so perfect for quickly jotting some thoughts without real distraction1.
Certainly there are applications with attractive GUIs and loads of features to manage lists of various kinds but are they really used? Not by me or anyone else I’m familiar with. What if the context switching cost is too high. And if so can it be the mouse? Actually there is another suspect—switching to a different window. I recently came to suspect that using the mouse to switch to another window/application causes simply de-focus the user. This might explain why all the application with rich GUIs and admittedly good features can’t convince users to use them for a long time. On the other hand plain textual lists with no sorting and filtering capabilities (not to mention archiving, outlining, sharing and publishing) are found much more useful2.
Interestingly, writing a note on a piece of paper does not set your mind wondering in other directions as writing a new Outlook task (or in an endless number of to-do lists, PIMs or project management application).
1 Check out John Wiegley’s planner mode for emacs.
2 As mentioned in Meet the Life Hackers .