A modest defense of the rodent
So, Emacs and the mouse. This is an unexpectedly contentious topic, with discussions that end, at best, with careless dismissal. More often they turn into arguments with folks talking past one another.
The advantages of using the mouse for common actions in Emacs are immediate and obvious. Window selection is a natural extension of basic mouse usage. Resizing windows is a snap. Context (right-click) menus See context-menu-mode.
Check out wind-move and and frame-move. On a Mac I bind the right command key to “super” and use that the prefix. I can then use super-arrow to move between windows and even frames. Before that I had to use the mouse more but this significantly speeds up my day.
In the end it’s not about which is THE way. It’s about building enough options to build an effective and efficient workflow. I’m glad emacs has useful mouse built in. I’m glad emacs has useful keyboard support built in too.
Check out wind-move and and frame-move. On a Mac I bind the right command key to “super” and use that the prefix. I can then use super-arrow to move between windows and even frames. Before that I had to use the mouse more but this significantly speeds up my day.
In the end it’s not about which is THE way. It’s about building enough options to build an effective and efficient workflow. I’m glad emacs has useful mouse built in. I’m glad emacs has useful keyboard support built in too.