CS789 - Spring, 2005

Activity instructions, Week 2

This week's activity: Count keystrokes, mouse motions, and everything else!

Use two editors, do two tasks, in two different ways: a total of eight combinations.

  1. Choose any two editors that you know
  2. For each editor and each task find two different ways of getting the desired result. (You don't need to do it, only to think through the steps needed to do it.)
  3. Here are the tasks
  4. Make a list of every action with the mouse and keyboard for each of the eight cases. For example, 'q' 'w' 'E' <CR> 'w' 'E' 'r' <CR> 'q' 'w' 'E' <CR> 'w' 'E' 'r' <CR> would be the description if you did the second task by simply typing the contents of the file. Things listed should include
  5. If you count each action as different than every other action it will be hard to compare different things. Clearly it's reasonable to group actions into categories. My example, above might be collected as It might also be collected as and in many other ways. What makes a collecting method good is closely similar 'cost' for all members of a category that is collected together. Our goal is to be able to associate a single cost for each category, and to find the total cost by adding them up, weighted by the number of times the cost is incurred. (Just like buying groceries.) Choose what you think is a suitable set of categories and collect items from the lists you made above.
  6. What do the sizes of the collections tell you about relative goodness of the editors, of the methods you created for doing the tasks?


Return to: