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Keyboard is still better than mouse for precision UI navigation
Just now I clicked on the Pictures item in my Start Menu when aiming for Documents. Just because I didn't move the mouse cursor far enough. Had I been using a keyboard, I could have a sequence of keystrokes that would guarantee a desired result. With the mouse, I have to actually look at where stuff is and where my cursor is going, and adjust my motions accordingly. With the keyboard, I don't even have to look at the computer and I can accomplish what I need.
It's this sort of difference that's partly why I complain about the movement away from laptops (including netbooks) toward tablets. Yeah I know tablets don't use mice, but the slower speed and lower accuracy of involving eye-hand coordination still makes it inferior to guaranteed, enterable-as-fast-as-your-fingers-can-move keystroke sequences.
Comments
Some of us don't have very fast fingers, or prefer moving around our hands around to tapping on arrow keys... or maybe that's just me.
Yeah, as I was typing up that post I realized that this might have to do with people putting less emphasis on speed, multitasking, and fingerwork than my habits do. So I'm starting to accept that this is a YMMV where I just happen to be on the wrong side of the trend.
Unfortunately, economies of scale mean that I pretty much get dragged along with trends unless I pay a lot for hardware or devices that are custom-built or at least feature a-la-carte choices of features.
When the alternative is "tap seven times and a miracle happens, every single time", yeah. But I fully admit that this comes with years of Windows OS usage experience, as well as having performed the actions in question on my own current computer hundreds of times. On a Mac OS machine, for example, I have heard that there similarly are lots of keyboard shortcuts, but I am entirely unable to replicate this level of navigation mastery (so to speak) and am essentially mouse-bound, because I don't know my way around the UI.
Which speaks to another point. This is partly why I want things to just be perfected, rather than changed significantly; when I've optimized my methods this tightly around a specific set of mechanisms, changes to them -- even as simple as laptop keyboards moving the Home/End/PgUP/PgDn keys around -- do become a bit jarring.
The system we use at work sometimes prompts you to press nonexistent keys. To tell it you're done scanning barcodes, for instance, you're told to press F16.
What "F16" really means is Shift+F4, but, like...how are you supposed to figure that out?
How the heck does shift + F4 = F16?
shift = 12, duh