From a “mouse guy” to a “keyboard guy” -Part I
If you are still a ‘keyboard person’ in the 21st century, you most probably will be a programmer.
In 1970 Douglas Engelbart brought the concept of the computer mouse and in 1973 it was first displayed to the general public. It took 10 years for this device to be popular and become part of our everyday life. In 1983 the Apple Lisa Computer was released with a mouse attached to it. This brought out a revolution in the world of computers. Later trackpads, touchpads and I would say the concept of the touchscreen will not be existing till now if the mouse weren’t invented even there won’t be any smartphones that we are using today. The mouse had brought luxury to human civilization. We cannot imagine even a single system without a pointer these days.
We are unaware of the working of a computer as we are living in a high-level language world. The concept of abstraction is being applied in everything we could imagine in this world. There was a time when the users need to write a few lines of code to open an application. Even to play a computer game we need to hard code it, the BASIC Language users would have experienced this in their life. At that time every storybook had a Basic language code printed on it so that the users could play games related to that story.
To get that feeling of the older days computer users had, we need not use those age-old systems. Instead, that feeling could be experienced in the Linux operating systems. Although it doesn’t reach those days’ experience, it’s reasonable. The popular operating system nowadays is the Windows operating system. I would call those users the proprietary people. Although Windows care very much about UI and UX, it had increased the distance between the computer and the humans. Whereas Linux, although it looks boring sometimes, it won’t cause any crack in the relation between humans and computers.
I would like to compare the above difference with an example of a guy who is new to web development. In windows what he will be doing is that he will watch all tutorials and he will make his system ready for web development. First, he will be creating an HTML file then right-click on it and choose Open with the IDE and start coding the page. Now coming to a Linux user, not everyone will be doing it but the majority of them will be, they will open the terminal then ‘cd’ to the respective directory the command to open the ide<space> ‘.’ the IDE opens then he makes the webpage. He will be having more like a Hollywood hacker kind of feeling the first time he does it (Under a condition he switched from Windows to Linux).
The usage of Terminal is so fantastic that it could not be expressed by a user. Even to check the network connection the user will use ‘ping google.com’ rather than opening a browser and typing google.com and searching.
By reading this, many of you must have guessed what I’m up to. Some of you may be thinking that I’m up for a Linux v/s Windows article. Some of you may be having no idea. So I’m up to convey that using a keyboard is much better than using a mouse. Still, you may be thinking “How the hell is this possible?”, I can explain, it doesn’t matter whether your OS in Windows of Linux. So lets drill down.
As I mentioned before check the internet instead of going to the browser we may use ping google.com, opening a terminal takes less time as compared to opening a browser. Here a point goes to Keyboard.
Next, you will be thinking that to open a terminal we need a mouse, we don’t need a mouse. In the Linux system usually on pressing Ctrl+Alt+T a terminal opens. In window just press Window Key + R and type cmd and Enter. Its that simple. Here again, the keyboard wins.
To open an application consider opening the Visual Studio Code. Normally we will be going to start menu, search for it, and then click, this is fine. Using a terminal we just type ‘code’ and press Enter, the editor opens. This says that every application could be opened using Terminal. Again the keyboard wins.
As of now, there could be a doubt, How will we know the commands for each application. The solution is to use it daily. Some of you may be saying that using a mouse will be better as we don’t need to remember anything, that shows the laziness hidden inside you. Due to this problem, a point goes to the mouse.
Now the score is 3–1. This is the end of part 1. In the next part, I intend to discuss fast keyboard alternatives for our day to day tasks using a mouse. For now, I am applying my brakes. By the time, you can check out which all tasks could be replaced using a keyboard.
