Comment by foxfluff
4 years ago
Sure. One could also make "move-down-one-line" be the incantation to move the cursor down a line in vi, but I prefer j.
Ergonomics isn't all about making everything self-descriptive for someone seeing the thing for the first time. It's about making things comfortable to actually use. If it's so long and complicated that you can't even remember how to do it, it's not very comfortable to use. Even if I could remember, xset m 0 0 is still far more comfortable.
And fwiw you still don't know what 0, 1 in accel profile do; you need to look that up or take a wild guess, and if you want to use that command, you'll also have to know how to look up the device because chances are yours is not the same as mine. So it's not any less magical in the end, just more verbose.
The "cool" thing about the xinput command is that you don't even find accel profile in the man page. You gotta look elsewhere if you want to understand what it is and what it does and what the parameters are.
xset m? Yes, that is documented in the man page.
> Ergonomics isn't all about making everything self-descriptive for someone seeing the thing for the first time.
We're talking about `xset`. It doesn't make sense to optimize that for usage of more than once a year.
The less frequently I need something, the more frustrating it is if it's not short and memorable (or easy to look up in the synopsis or built-in help). Forgetting and googling a needlessly complicated command over and over again every year isn't fun.
xset achieves that perfectly. If I somehow didn't remember how to set mouse acceleration with it, a quick glance at the synopsis immediately tells me. Or I can just run the command and it'll tell me:
Zero frustration, and the command is so short and simple that I end up remembering it without trying.
This is something I've observed more than once: I easily memorize useful sets of one-letter flags even if I can't remember or know what they all stand for. This just doesn't happen nearly as much with long options. Commands like ls -ctrl or ss -nap quickly become part of my repertoire even if I don't use them very often, but I really couldn't remember ss --numeric --all --processes (if I had written that from memory, it could've ended up as --num --all --pid or --numeric --any --process), and I don't even know what the corresponding long options for ls are. In the rare case when I have to deal with an option that has no short equivalent, I feel like I have to look it up every time if it's been longer than a few weeks.
You talk of optimization but I think this is just a very basic (and reasonably successful) attempt at sane design. It's not like someone had to go far out of their way to make this in a manner that isn't batshit insane.
It should be based on frequency of usage. I can tell you that moving down a line in vim is a little more common than toggling the mouse acceleration.
I would never even type such a command. I would just copy paste it once.
Yeah well, given that mouse acceleration tends to be on by default, I need to turn it off every time I'm on a fresh install or computer I haven't used before. The last time I needed that was yesterday.
I don't want to waste time searching for a command to copy-paste when it could just be made short, simple, memorable and ergonomic. I could type xset m 0 0 faster than I could open a browser and ask google how to disable acceleration with libinput. And again: you can't just copy-paste the xinput command unless you're lucky enough that it matches your device. On my new computer, the device has a different name than on my old laptop even though it's the same damn mouse.
It should be, but how would you keep track of usage frequency?
At least it would push all the "This switch was added by someone playing with UNIX at a university in 1986 and hasn't been used since" options to the end of the list.