And as far as I’m concerned, I have proved this absolutely.
In previous posts (and if you’ve ever spoken to me or seen my setup) you’ll see a trend emerging- I don’t use a mouse very much. I’m not enough of a zealot to use ratpoison/Xmonad/awesome et al, because
a) I develop a webapp at work, clicking is a nessessity; and
b) I find they only work well with very simple window arrangements, and I like to have jillions of windows (nearly all urxvts) open at any given time.
However, I do use nearly all applictions that don’t require a mouse. I use pentadactyl with firefox, or on lower end hardware, uzbl. I do all of my editing in vim, I use irssi for irc, and ncmpc to control my music. In short, I rarely touch the mouse for things that aren’t implicitly mouse centric.
In the last few days though, I have read lots of things. I would estimate about 47.2% of the internet, and to this end I have been almost exclusively using my wireless trackball to control my laptop while laying on my side. From there, reaching for my keyboard is a pain, and as a result I’ve been applying the Vim mentality (How can I achieve my goal with the fewest number of clicks) to navigation using only my trackball. Ie, I have a few tabs open, what’s the easiest way to find something to read via the minimal number of clicks.
The best path I’ve found has been Google+ Tab -> Google Reader -> xkcd/qc/whatever -> links sidebar generally is enough to find a link to something interesting. I’ve also read more of lifehacker than I really want to talk about.
The point I’m illustrating though, is that while in the course of a normal day when I’m striving for productivity, I use the keyboard for everything, and the mouse for as little as possible. When my focus shifted to achieving essentially as little as possible the keyboard become a pain, and the mouse the greatest thing ever.
