Some Computing · 19 November 2002
With the goal of improving these tumbling deskbound hours I bought a new mouse yesterday. Its box indicates the mouse is a Special Edition. It has five buttons and a scrolling wheel; all are programmable. Though it was assembled in China, its design and promotion originate in Redmond, Washington. It cost sixty Euros.
It is a shiny piece of shit. Tomorrow I will return it.
In recent years I have grown to resent the mouse: the dock, the drag-and-drop, the graphical user interface. The mouse is of course indispensible for some applications, but for navigating text and file hierarchies it’s like using chopsticks to pull books off of shelves. It is constantly irritating to have to leave the keyboard and move around a device just to get somewhere.
There are workarounds. On the Macintosh, most Finder actions ordinarily requiring a mouse (e.g., launching and moving files or scripts) can be triggered with key commands using third-party applications like Quickeys and Dragthing, but these commands must be created individually, making it too much of a bother most of the time. It should just work.
And now – through a simple utility – it does. Launchbar by Norbert Heger is a small work of genius. Once installed, it runs off a quick index of files, applications, internet bookmarks and email addresses on your computer. From then on, getting at just about anything you need is just a matter of calling up Launchbar from the keyboard (in the latest version this happens almost instantly) and typing in two or three characters: ‘ps’ for Photoshop, ‘doc’ for your Documents folder, ‘ie’ for a certain web browser designed and marketed in Redmond, Washington, and so on. Automatic keyboard shortcuts for everything. For $20.
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