How to Make Your Mouse Obsolete

In the post about command-line interface, I discussed briefly on the slowness of computer mouse in comparison with using keyboard, and argued that your workflow would be much more smoothly and faster if you could ditch your mouse and work fully using your keyboard. Well, one could say it is a unrealistic and stupid idea: mouse was invented for a reason, and that reason is that you can’t do everything with your keyboard.

But is it true?

Wait, are you serious?

Yes. And please hear me out.

It’s true that you only have a limited number of keys on your keyboard (which normally ranges from 60-108 keys, though I’ve seen keyboards with more or less keys than that); and it’s also true that the keyboard doesn’t have the fancy functionality to visually move to any position on your screen. However, unlike a mouse with just left click, right click and double-click (and maybe scrolling, which until recently wasn’t considered a standard mouse functionality), a keyboard has the unlimited ability to combine different keys together. As the number of key combinations is so damn great, that should be more than enough to give a code to any activity you can think of.

In some way, the laptop’s touchpad, which is normally right below the keyboard, can be considered an attempt to reduce the time travel between mouse and keyboard. I remember when I was in eighth grade, I had an idea of making “a keyboard that can also control mouse” (I didn’t know anything about laptop or touchpad) because I was so fed up with having to twist my wrist to use both mouse and keyboard at the same time. The design I came up with is a normal keyboard with a big ball (which replicates the old-fashioned mouse, which moves by a ball) below the spacebar. When I presented that to my CS teacher, he looked me up and down and asked “So you never seen a laptop, have you?”

However, the general technology development trends don’t really support using more keyboard. If any, it promotes keyboard to be less needed by providing touch screens. I have no personal problem with the touchscreens, but while they’re a little faster than the mouse, they are still so much slower than keyboard.

The reason why touchscreens, and mouse before it, are popular, is because they make senses to people. Why keyboards are faster way to communicate with computers, using them requires a lot of muscle memories and many people will just give up on technology if they are required to use only keyboards. I personally think touchscreens are great for small devices like mobile phones (to which it’s inconvenient to attach a physical keyboard ), but I can’t understand why people want it on big screen computers, except for presentation purposes

If you’re still not persuaded, you should remember that there was a time when no mouse, and no graphical interface was in use, and humankind could manage to send people to the Moon. Even today, most of our use cases still don’t need the mouse: command-line interface is very powerful.

Luckily, we are programmers, so just because the big tech companies don’t do that, doesn’t mean we can’t do it ourselves.

Huh? So your solution is to write all the apps we need?

It’d be awesome if you could, but that’s not what I mean. Having applications that don’t use mouse at all is many programmers’ dreams, so many great developers have done the same thing. Nowadays, we have all sort of those apps out there, ready for you to pick, free of charge (I will discuss some of my favorite apps in later post). The only problem is the operating system, in which except for the company who produces it, no one, even the computers’ owners (aka you guys), has permission to change much. That means even if you can find favorite applications that let you do everything with keyboard, eventually you will have to touch your mouse, when you need to open or switch app, or do stuff between apps, or interact with the OS in any other way.

So as long as you still need the OS installed in your computer, it will always get in your way. Except if you have an OS that doesn’t care if you use mouse or not.

Unlucky for us, major operating systems for PC (i.e. Windows and MacOS) don’t really like that idea. Despite how many “hot keys” the producers put into their products, it’s not likely that they will ditch the mouse (until they decided to go all-in with touchscreens or gesturing or something totally different). After all, it took the world decades to finally invent the mouse, something that makes sense to everybody, cutting the mouse means losing at least half of your customers to your competitors, something no business person in their right mind will allow. Not all hopes are lost, though, if only someone who doesn’t care much about making profits could come up with an OS.

As a single person, almost no one can create an operating system from scratch. Well, no one but Linus Tolvards, who created the Linux back in early 90s. Instead of founding a corporation and develop the product, Tolvards decided to contribute it to the community, and is nowadays one key member of the Linux Foundation. Because Linux is just a kernel and is free, it allows anyone interested to develop things on top of it, which includes Window Managers and Desktop Environment, which is responsible to almost every interaction between users and computers and are out of control for developers in MacOS or Windows. That’s why nowadays we can find all sort of software, mostly free, running on Linux.

Since Linux allows freely creation and use of custom software, developers get an easier time if they want to create a system that can be control solely by keyboards. And as you may have guessed, some great developers have done it. (In fact, there are so many different Desktop Environments and Window Managers that use no mouse, and I only have experience in some of them.)

So yes, you can totally ditch the mouse and become more productive, but it’ll likely mean you’ll have to give up your familiar environment and start a new with another. The journey will be a bit challenging, but once you get it, I guarantee that it’ll be worth it.

Next posts in this series will give you more ideas on Linux and some of the Window Managers that I have used, as well as some instruction to get started. See you then!