Mouse editing... useful but not popular?

This is just a bit of a rant, possibly about something people think is really trivial to talk about but I think there's something worth saying here.

I've been noticing a lot of blogs and people using tools claiming that never taking one's hands off the keyboard is a good thing. This seems to be generally accepted as a rule of thumb to follow, but I don't buy it.

There's window managers that abolish the mouse completely for X such as Xmonad and ratpoison. They certainly have their merits and people are adopting them and finding that they get more work done than in alternative window managers. All of that is fine, I'm not trying to take anything away from those people or those projects, I'd just like to challenge the premise that hardly ever using the mouse is always optimal.

A few examples to the contrary that I've found for myself:

Expose in Mac OS X allows me to quickly use my touchpad, or trackball/mouse to point at a location on my desktop and quickly see all my windows and nearly immediately point to the window I'm interested in. To me this is a lot more useful than memorizing which of many desktops I might have decided to put certain windows on, or tabbing through to cycle to the correct window, or possibly remembering what shortcut key goes to a particular window on the current desktop. Point and click is easy.

Still I've peers who don't like Expose and do everything they can to turn it off.

When editing text, GUI versions of Emacs allow me to sweep over text and use that as a copy command to move text around during editing sessions. This is not as powerful as the Acme editor from Plan 9, in that I can chord buttons on my trackball to cut and paste text to different locations without taking my hand off the mouse.

I will admit I'm a bit of an emacs junkie, for better or worse, and like my elisp based customizations I've become used to over the years do save me a bit of time for certain tasks. Those are nearly always keyboard accessible shortcuts, but again, this becomes a memorization process of those commands. That memorization and customization is initially a distraction from getting work done, but it does become habit after a short time, and then it feels very fluid. I still often find myself switching between Acme, Sam, and emacs depending on the sort of editing I'm doing.

I don't see how selecting text with arrow keys or control key combinations is ever faster than a mouse sweep and click. In fact while editing this blog I find myself taking my hands off the keyboard, pointing at a word or phrase to double click and change a word very quickly, much faster than if I had to press repetitions of keys and delete buttons to change text.

I'll also go ahead and admit that before I'd used Acme, and I mean really used it for a little while, I was in the camp of people who would have said that never removing the hands from the keyboard was faster without even questioning why that is.

My advice to people is to try some of these other editors, and see if you can understand where I'm coming from. The people who designed the editors that are mouse driven have written large amounts of code in their day, and they've certainly gained a lot of experience in knowing what annoys them during an editing session and wanted to make changes to make the process more comfortable for themselves.

Worst case scenario is you'll still think that keyboard-only is the way to go and you'll not really have lost anything but maybe have re-assured yourself that for your work environment, that's the best way for you to go. Maybe you'll learn a new way to work that you find is faster.

Also, there's a lot more reasons to really like Sam or Acme, but that's for another time.