🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1279@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> mwm@eris.UUCP (Mike Meyer) writes:
>Actually, I can. Somewhere I've got a paper describing a study done on
>editor interfaces, and it turns out that the fastest interface - in
>general - is a foursome of arrow keys plus function keys. Second is an
>emacs-like interface (vi wasn't in the study), and third is the mouse.
>Finding the mouse seems to be the killer.
>

There was a paper entitled "The Evaluation of Text Editors: Methodology and
Empirical Results" by Teresa L. Roberts and Thomas P. Moran in the April
1983 Communications of the ACM.

This study compared 9 different editors (including Emacs, Teco, and several
Xerox mouse-based editors) using predicted and actual times to perform a
variety of tasks.  There were a couple of interesting things in the paper.

First, in their predicted times, they concluded that "the homing time
between the keyboard and pointing device is not a major problem".  The
exception to this was the WANG editor that relies heavily on function keys
separate from the main typing array.  

Second, in the actual timings with expert users the 2 fastest editors were
mouse-based, the third was the WANG.

-- 
Larry Rosenstein

Object Specialist
Apple Computer

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