Using a Computer Without a Mouse for a Week

At tech site ITworld, there’s a feature called ‘I’ll Try It!’ where one lucky (or unlucky) person gets to live for seven days doing something unconventional, to see how they’ll get by. Normally, I’d be up for all sorts of challenges, because how bad could they be? Well, a recent challenge laid out by the site and bestowed upon one editor makes me cringe. It’s something I simply wouldn’t be able to do. What’s that? Using your PC without a mouse.

It might seem simple in idea alone, but just picture it. No mouse to move to the address bar in a Web browser to type something in. No mouse to make even a simple edit on a photo. No mouse to game with. No mouse to move a cursor around the screen when you’re bored. I guess what I’m driving at is… you wouldn’t have a mouse, for anything.

I can generally get by without a mouse for most things, and I have a ton of keyboard shortcuts, but for many things, a mouse is simply ideal, if not required. And today, it’s even more difficult to use an application without a mouse because most GUI designers don’t take a non-mouse setup into consideration. In some cases, pushing ‘Tab’ does nothing, when it should bounce from usable element to usable element in an application. In the Windows XP days, using a keyboard-only setup would have been a lot easier than it is today.

That’s basically what the author of the article found as well, but what he also found was that a lot of applications actually do offer robust keyboard configuration options. Chances are you don’t even know about most of them. Google is one company that I can say does take keyboard shortcuts rather seriously; both Gmail and Google Reader have tons of them.

So, is this a challenge you could see yourself taking on? If so, you deserve a kudos based on your acceptance alone. However, I’d never put someone through that. Maybe I need to dedicate myself to a Linux tiling desktop environment and see if I can ween myself off first.