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.
- Choose any two editors that you know
- 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.)
- Here are the tasks
- Change
star
into rats
.
- Create
qwE
wEr
qwE
wEr
starting from an empty file.
- 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
- keystrokes
- mouse movements
- mouse button presses
- 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
- 6 digit keystrokes
- 4 lower case letter keystrokes
- 2 upper case letter keystrokes
- 3 returns
It might also be collected as
- 12 left hand keystrokes
- 2 right hand shifts
- 3 right hand keystrokes
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.
- What do the sizes of the collections tell you about relative goodness
of the editors, of the methods you created for doing the tasks?
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