There is a currently ongoing debate in the neuropsychology world about how we relate to the tools that we use. The theory of “tool embodiment” says that when we use some tools frequently enough, our brain recognizes them similarly to how it recognizes our own hands, for instance. There is evidence and counter-evidence from experiments with prosthetics, trash-grabber arms, and rubber dummy arms, just to name a few. It’s fair to say the jury is still out.
All I know is that today my trackball broke, and using a normal gaming mouse to edit the podcast was torture. It would be an exaggeration to say that I felt like I’d lost a hand, but I have so much motor memory apparently built up in my use of the trackball that switching over to another tool to undertake the exact same series of hundreds of small audio edits – mostly compensating for the audio delay across continents, but also silencing coughs and background noises – took an extra hour.
Anyone who has switched from one keyboard to another, or heck even from emacs to vim, knows what I experienced. My body just knows how to flick my wrist to make the cursor on the screen move over to the beginning of that “umm”. It’s not like I don’t conceptually know how to use a mouse either, and it does exactly the same job. But the mouse wasn’t my tool for this application. And saying that out loud makes it almost sound like I’m bordering on embodying my trackball.
I probably should have taken the trackball apart and replaced the bad tact switch on the left-click – that would have taken maybe twenty minutes – but I completely underestimated how integral the tool had become to the work. Anyway, as I write this, tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll have time to fix it. But today, I learned something pretty neat about myself in the process, even if I don’t think my single datapoint is going to rock the academic psych world.
I’ve been using a Logitech Marble trackball for about 25 years and it does feel like part of my nervous system now. I can use other pointing devices but they don’t feel at all natural. I hope you manage to fix yours!
they say you never forget how to ride a bike so i suspect it’s simply a general trackball skill, not tied to a specific peripheral. imo trackballs have an unfair advantage when using button scrolling, but for general cursor usage they are much the same as a mouse.
You might never forget but there is certainly a familiarity you build up with your specific input device that will take time to really match on another model. For instance similar as the Steamcontroller (original) and the Steamdeck trackpads are in use the square edges vs round and the deflection of your digit to put it one the trackpad at all are so different you can’t take a control scheme you loved on one straight to the other seamlessly (with my large hands without a case that seriously pads out the grip I can’t actually get comfortably on them at all). To the point I tend to create entirely different control schemes for each device.
Knipex 86 feels like Deus Ex-style augment for my hand, both for repairs and for casual vandalism. Unfortunately the finish quality and materials took a dive after Knipex moved their entire production to China so I’m looking for a replacement.
Fully agree… and its fascinating, how fast one can adapt to ergonomic keyboards, different speeds of mouse cursors or the UI to your cruise control in the car. Even fighting with lane assist becomes a fun habit at some point.
The most impressive adaptation so far was teleoperating a humanoid (yes, the G1 ;oP ) via VR goggles, where it took the brainz less than a minute to make it its own. Guess n the end we are just xLM agents float… uhm… operating in the Matrix.
My biggest complaint is the inconsistency in all the user interfaces that surround us.
In a normal editing process, clicking the mouse places the cursor, click and drag selects text, and so on…
except click on the address bar automatically selects everything. To place the cursor I have to do something different depending on what type of text field it is.
Will Tab will get you to the next UI item, or the next text field, or the next “clickable” item such as a link? Two days ago I was filling out forms for a complicated purchase and asked the salesman if I could just type in the data for him (name, address &c)… and I couldn’t. The UI interface on their web app implements none of the keyboard shortcuts such as tab (you must use the mouse), and if you brush against the touchpad it automatically scrolls off to an unused corner of the page.
Mousewheel will scroll the page, unless the cursor is on a scrollable item, in which case it will scroll that, and the scrollable item can have an embedded scrollable item and it’s sometimes not clear where one ends and the other begins, so that you have to hunt around for an area to scroll in. (For example: Yandex image search.)
Many examples of programming IDE’s and writer’s decks and other software that includes an embedded editor (OpenScad, Arduino, and on and on) that map familiar editing functions to different places on the keyboard. Fortunately, cut/copy/paste has been taken over by ^X ^C ^V so you can mostly get by, but this interferes with the emacs mappings.
I purchased a programming editor once that listed “emacs compatibility” as one of the editor modes (which is why I bought it), after it was installed the compatability mode use ^X as cut always, but it’s OK because we moved ^X over to ^P, so just use that!
My bank online interface has menu items for portfolio, bill pay, and so on… that dropdown on hover, and not dropdown on click, because of course click closes the menu. It’s annoying every time I use it.
And ChatGPT has some weird implementation of copy (and click-drag for select) that sometimes allows you to copy the selected text, and sometimes only allows for “ask ChatGPT” of the text so you have to clear the selection and try again.
When I was younger, the company I worked for used to have people in and watch how they used our computer system doing typical tasks and note whenever they would stumble on some action, then analyze the action and see if there was some UI inconsistency or some other reason that could be adjusted for a better experience.
No one does that any more. No one even considers the burden of their UI choices on the end user.
And I don’t think it will get any better.