Subject: Keyboard bs. Mouse Continued

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 14:28:46 +0300 (IDT)

Hi and happy Shavo'uth,

This semester I decided to prepare all the assignments in Electrical
Enginerring Lab 1 on the computer using MS-Word. Naturally, we have to
write a lot of equations in the process, so if I had used only the mouse
it would have taken a lot of time.

What I discovered was that the Word Equation Editor has many key bindings,
which can be used instead of the mouse menus. For instance, a subscript is
"Ctrl+L" a smart-parenthesis are "Ctrl+(", a fraction is Ctrl+F, and
so-forth.

By using them, I was able to write large parts of the equations without
using the mouse (the Greek letters are still a mouse annoyance, though).
With that and the normal Word shortcuts (Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+[ and
Ctrl+] for resizing text, and the menus) it made using Word for those kind
of things bearable. Not enlightening, not joyful (word is neither) - but
still bearable.

My lab partner who doesn't know all those shortcuts spends much more time
with the equation editor than I do, as I witnessed.

BTW, EE-Lab 1 is the first Technion course, in which we found
using MS-Paint for actually drawing things from scratch a good idea. I
actually draw a dotted-line pixel by pixel (and then replicated it).
Naturally, Corel-Draw would have been much better for what we had to do,
and GIMP is always better than MS-Paint anyway you look at it, but our NT
farms carries neither.

Such programs tend to be very unusable with the keyboard, unless of course
one writes Script-Fu scripts or something like that.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked] 
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes
what went wrong more quickly.