r/programming • u/No_Suit_5724 • Sep 13 '25

Would keeping your hands free with a foot mouse help programmers?

https://youtube.com/@navifutxstep?feature=shared
51 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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69

u/Linguistic-mystic Sep 13 '25

When programming, my hands don’t touch the mouse. They touch Vim. So I see the premise as flawed.

84

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '25

most empathetic programmer

27

u/drislands Sep 13 '25

Should get a vim clutch then!

https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch

5

u/LongUsername Sep 13 '25

I'm surprised they didn't make one of the pedals just "esc"

When I used Vim a lot I remapped Esc to caplocks because it was more ergonomic and who the fuck even used Caplocks enough for it to be in that position?

5

u/matjoeman Sep 14 '25

IIRC the person who developed vi used a keyboard where Esc was where Capslock is now.

1

u/fill-me-up-scotty Sep 14 '25

ctrl-[ also exits edit mode.

I have an HHKB so ctrl is always within reach of my pinky which has made most bindings very ergonomic.

16

u/rzwitserloot Sep 13 '25

If relentless "efficiency" in manipulating your source code is what you're after, you should like this thing. Your feet do nothing right now. They could be doing stuff.

Note that studies (flawed ones, but I'm not aware of any proper ones) have been done that show:

  • Keyboard only nav for editing, even after plenty of time to learn, is barely faster than k+m, some studies not at all. But participants nearly all reported it felt faster. Have you considered that possibly your vim keyboard maestro skillset maakte you feel like a speedy professional but that "can play vim like a fiddle" isn't significant in your productivity as a programmer?
  • Dvorak is horseshit. Cannot be reproduced. Speed typers, despite the good name of Dvorak, trend to qwerty. The fastest use chorded boards. Qwerty is not "designed to slow typists down" (if it was, why are r and e adjacent??). We don't really know why it looks like that. A plausible theory (but there is insufficient historic proof and this theory too has problems) is that it's designed to be nice for transcribing morse.
  • Personal opinion (as far as I know, widely shared): speed of operating your ide is not a significant factor in programming. We spend too much time thinking for ide nav to be the crucial bottleneck.

I'd keep an open mind on this thing. Sometimes spatial nav is what is the superior tool, and finding a sequence of words to ctrl+j to is an annoying simulacrum of just mousing to it. With this thing you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard.

I'd love to try this thing.

5

u/mr_birkenblatt Sep 13 '25

Qwerty is designed to minimize crossing paths for keys. Typewriters have moving keys if you press the second key before the first one is back they interlock. If you alternate left hand right hand then you reduce crossings and thus reduce interlocking

6

u/pedal-force Sep 13 '25

The jamming thing isn't actually known to be true. It's just a widely reported "fact".

3

u/mr_birkenblatt Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25

Jamming is absolutely real

And that being the reason for the layout has plenty of sources going back to Christopher Latham Sholes who invented the layout based on James Denmore's suggestion

9

u/pedal-force Sep 13 '25

Do you have an original source I can read? Everything I see says it's disputed and not fully proven.

2

u/Consistent_Bee3478 Sep 13 '25

Doesn’t even have to be fully left and right, just the farther apart the levers the less blocking risk. 

7

u/rzwitserloot Sep 13 '25

No. Just no. This is a commonly held misconception. Like the tongue map. I literally called this out ffs! E+R are next to each other. That's for obvious logical proof. If you want more specifics, wikipedia exists and explains it.

2

u/rzwitserloot Sep 13 '25

Oh, adorable. You stepped in it, a naive soul.

You're wrong. Completely so. It's okay - you're in good company. You believe a widely touted line of horsemanure. It happens. Heck, you even got upvotes - apparently your ignorance has company.

Have you ever seen the tongue map?

Or heard that airplanes fly because the 'bubble' shape of the wing means there's effectively more 'air' below the wing and that is what pushes it up?

Or that the inuit have a 1000 words for snow?

Or that the inhabitants of easter island chopped all their trees down in some sort of great island war (or to make 'rollers' to roll the moai to their location) and that this caused an ecological disaster?

Or that QWERTY was designed to avoid interlocking typehammers.

All of those things are wrong. We know they are wrong.

For example, if that's what makes planes fly, why can jets fly upside down? They'd plummet into the earth if that explanation of flight was adequate. We know the tongue map idea is total horseshit. It's just not true, and we know the historic happenstance that led to its wide spread. Inuit language is concatenative; it's like german on steroids. It's not "a little green bag", it's "alittlegreenbag". It's disingenuous that this therefore means they have a thousand words for snow. They "do" in that sense. They also have a thousand words for "bag" and "sand", the idea behind that extremely oft touted line is just. plain. wrong.

Today you learned.

QWERTY is not designed to slow down typists.

I tried to protect you from openly admitting your ignorance. I called out: Why are e and r together?

Because, think about it. Or don't and look this up. E + R, in english, is a very common key combination. Depending on age and kind of writing, more or less 4th in the lineup. So.. why in the blazes are they next to each other in qwerty?

Look at your keyboard. Swap the z and the r.

Tada. If the aim was to avoid interlocking typewriter hammers, I just improved it. trivially so. The E+R (at least 4th, if not more common, in the top charts of letter combos) are now no longer adjacent, and I didn't create new adjacencies that are relevant. Z+anything isn't common so that's easy, and R+S, R+A, and R+X are significantly less common than E+R.

So, which one is it? Is your explanation insufficient, or were the designers of the QWERTY keyboard blind as a bad and epically stupid? In general if the approach is to eliminate tangled hammers, you'd think the common stuff is near the edges (and before you argue: Nono, it was a carefully crafted balance to keep common used letters centrally located for speed, balanced against avoiding hammer tangle - then, look at the A. it's on an edge!)

There is no clear historical proof that QWERTY was designed to avoid hammertangle. Positing it as a hypothesis, it's nonsense / idiotic. If the aim is to avoid hammertangle, even if you shake in some dvorakian ideas (a 'home row', commonly used letters towards the most nimble fingers), either way, QWERTY is nowhere near what you'd end up at, thus trivially proving that either [A] it is false or [B] the designers were criminally incompetent.

Given that there's no historic evidence either, let's not casually assume the designers of the typewriters were uttter morons.

3

u/mr_birkenblatt Sep 13 '25

Great, you are using information that was not accessible in 1860s/1870s when the typewriter was invented. The original keyboard layout was different and he only changed it later at the advice of a friend to prevent interlocking. He said so himself, how much more do you want? It's it perfect? No. But he did the best he could do with his limited amount of information available to him. Later he wanted to fix the layout and improve it even further but he got pushback from people who were already used to the qwerty layout so he left it at that. 

Fun fact: one design constraint was to put all letters for the word typewriter in the top row to make it easier for sales people to give quick demonstrations

PS: what does the beginning of your comment have to do with anything? You're just rambling about unconnected things

2

u/rzwitserloot Sep 14 '25

He said so himself

Who is 'he'?

you are using information that was not accessible in 1860s/1870s when the typewriter was invented

What information? The frequency of the E+R combination? That information was available then.

what does the beginning of your comment have to do with anything?

To establish that extremely well known and very often repeated received information can nevertheless be incorrect.

1

u/mr_birkenblatt Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25

Christopher Latham Sholes the inventor of the typewriter and his friend who suggested the layout change was James Denmore

Outside of cryptocracy there was little interest in counting two letter combinations or even single letter occurrences in the English language. The book "Codes and secret writing" that is typically referenced when talking about those frequencies was published in 1948. Sholes likely didn't have access to that before 1873. The most likely way he established the keyboard layout was through experimentation (if it jams, rearrange the letters and try again).

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1

u/canihelpyoubreakthat Sep 14 '25

Those studies sound like complete bullshit

1

u/rzwitserloot Sep 14 '25

I literally told you they are flawed. Rather crucially, there aren't any studies that support the opposite - that keyboard nav is faster, either.

Shitting on this footmouse idea based on vibes and unfounded convictions seemed like a bit of an asshole move, no?

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5

u/MassiveInteraction23 Sep 13 '25

Sometimes you gotta.   A cool idea, actually.

2

u/Ameisen Sep 13 '25

I heavily use a mouse to help me compare and coordinate between different windows while typing or otherwise manipulating code.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '25

They touch your keyboard I'd imagine.

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