There are old studies from the 70s showing that moving the cursor with mouse is faster than navigation keys. Tog famously claimed that Apple's internal studies consistently showed that mouse felt slower than it actually is, whereas keyboard navigation felt faster.

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hbnjgf a day ago | parent | next [-]

I guess it depends on the distance. If you are currently typing and need to get to the beginning of the word, obviously it's way faster to navigate using the keyboard than the mouse.

If instead you need to navigate somewhere you don't exactly know the location of, scanning and clicking is faster.

Then again, if you happen to know the exact location, going there by command is much faster

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fc417fc802 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Selecting text is also a good example where the mouse is faster. One of the few for me. Having to switch modes, move to a line, then move to a character, then repeat that, is quite cumbersome in comparison.

I'll take good keyboard controls for pretty much anything else though.

	▲	skydhash a day ago \| parent [-]
		With Vim and Emacs, you have nice commands for getting to an exact position. And if you're replacing, you don't need selections. Selection is mostly for copying, cutting, and applying commands.

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skydhash a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> If instead you need to navigate somewhere you don't exactly know the location of, scanning and clicking is faster.

Search is better especially with code. I used emacs and vim more than other editors, so I got use to their navigation shortcut. And on macOS, the trackpad is nice and convenient. But I still prefer search and paging shortcuts when I need to scroll.

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petepete a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure it'll hold up when you factor in moving your hand between the keyboard and mouse repeatedly.

Skipping forward 3 words on the line, for example, could be ctrl+right ×3.

I can do that faster than I can move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse, let alone drag it around.