Originally posted by Blog
I like mouse gestures! screw keyboard shortcuts, I need that hand to shake angrily at the screen.
I think the best solution, from the point of view of an operating system (or application) developer, is to provide both and let people use either. Sometimes it's handy, for instance, that you can right-click and select "Copy" and "Paste" - I can lean over to someone else's computer, grab only the mouse, ignore the keyboard, and do things. But other times, it's way more convenient to use the keyboard exclusively. And there are myriad times when it's possible to get the most amazing performance out of you and your computer by using a combination.

However, development time has to be balanced against utility. If Aristotle spent two solid weeks reworking Threshold so that you could use the mouse to navigate (and that's not purely hypothetical - I know what would have to be done to both server and client, and it probably would be of that order of work), you would rightly say that it wasn't worth the coding effort; but when I spent maybe half an hour adding a feature to RosMud whereby you could click on a URL as well as typing "url" to browse it, that _was_ worth it. Mousing is all very well, but I wouldn't put too much effort into it unless there's very good reason.