In all honesty, I’ve never been completely comfortable with having to live life halfway between "keyboard and mouse". As anyone who has spent time reading any of my blog articles will notice, there’s a tendency to focus on keyboard-related topics (in a sort-of obsessive-compulsive way). This is because I simply don't enjoy moving away from the home position. When you’ve gotten used to using Vim and have become accustomed to moving very quickly between things, it just seems like a tremendous waste to actually move your hand away from where it’s seated.

I came across this guy fairly recently who isn’t a technologist (but, never-the-less, characterises himself as a nerd) and prides himself in being a super-speedy typist. He attributes his productivity directly to his typing speed, which is an interesting take on things (the idea appeals to me, but somewhow I suspect that there’s a lot more to his productivity gains than just his typing speed—he seems like the type who gets a big kick out of honing efficiency).

I digress. So I recently decided to take the plunge and spend some dosh on a Kinesis Advantage.

This is because, of course, if you’re going to spend most of your life in “keyboard land”, you may as well keep it as luxurious as you can. The difficulty, of course (coming back to the topic of this article) is that getting even further into having one’s hands ensconced within comfy keywells doesn’t make life any easier when it comes to having to drag them out to shift the ubiquotous rodent-digitizer to do the odd thing that just can’t be done with a keyboard alone.

This is the bane of my life; what to do with those things that you absolutely have to have a planar digitizer for? (replace with classic mouse, trackball, roller bar, joystick mouse, pen mouse, finger mouse, vertical mouse or even an external touch pad). As is the case with many things in life, there’s no silver bullet, so one has to make the best of things through incremental efficiency gains. I’d like to go through some of the ones that I’ve adopted in coming articles, so let this one be a “launchpad” of sorts into specific scripts, tools, processes and techniques that I’ve adopted to scratch this particular itch.

(FWIW, I have, for some time being use the Logitech M570 for reasons that I may be persuaded to go into in future; it’s a reasonably priced piece of hardware and has the signifcant advantage of being an obedient [albeit upside-down] rodent that stays put).