Keyboard versus mouse online

The Tog test

In 1989, Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini described results of Apple Computer's research into mouse efficiency:

We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

Keyboard zealots rebelled so strongly against this conclusion that Tog felt compelled to publish two follow-up articles, in which he described a specific test:

Using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh, I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." Just to make it even harder, the test subjects, when using the mouse, were forbidden to just drop the cursor to the right of the | and then use the delete key to get rid of it. Instead, they had to actually drag the mouse pointer across the one-pixel width of the character to select it, then press the "e" key to replace it

This page lets you test yourself.

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