Whenever you see articles about doing things faster, navigating the web more efficiently, they tend to be about keyboard shortcuts and how you can use them to jump around items, and perform certain tasks much faster. While this is certainly true, I feel that the common mouse is badly outspoken in this area. Let me quickly try and discuss my feelings about when to use your mouse and when to use your keyboard.

Most importantly the reason keyboard shortcuts are faster than the mouse in most cases is that in many situations you are typing anyway. So the use of a shortcut doesn’t cut the time it takes you to jump from one item to the other with the mouse, but rather the time it takes you hand to go from the keyboard to the mouse and to get oriented on screen. In other words if you want to perform an action on screen and you are holding the mouse anyway, the mouse would probably be quicker (except when doing multiple stuff at once, see below).

Another factor in keyboard mastery is dexterity. When you use a keyboard you need to use your senses to find the right key, which you do by either looking and pressing or typing blindly. Either way, there is direct action, you press something in the physical world, you do this millions of times every day. With a mouse it’s a bit different. You have to move an item, which in turn controlls a virtual object on screen. You need to synchronize your movement and follow the cursor meaning less accuracy and more time to execute. These are of course minimal times measurable in tenths of seconds, but they are there nevertheless.

So when is it practical to use keyboard shortcuts? First of all they are only helpful if you know them very well, meaning they come automatically. Ctr+S for save, Ctr+F for find, and maybe advanced stuff like Alt+Shift+B for inserting a HTML line break and so on. Noone can be expected to learn loads of these in a few minutes, but if you still find yourself thinking about the more common ones after many hours of use you should probably go with the mouse.

Keyboard shortcuts are most useful in situations where your work is either very keyboard-heavy, like writing, or if it’s almost exclusively mouse-heavy and you can use your left hand to trigger various events without taking the right hand off the mouse (Photoshop work for example). In these cases you can either save the time of going back and forth between the keys and the mouse, or you can add your second non-mouse hand as a full companion to the work.

As a sidenote, if you have a scrollwheel on your mouse please use it. I have to say this happens to the people well endowed with age more often, but the mousewheel is the most easily used and understood tool ever. Scrollbars are hard to use, get in your way and just spinning something down to go down is better and doesn’t get much simpler. Sorry, that’s just something that bugs me