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Breaking Bad Habits - Stop Using The Mouse!

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Lately I’ve been really trying to avoid using the mouse while coding.  You may not realize it but it’s a huge distraction to:

  1. Stop typing
  2. Find your mouse
  3. Find your cursor
  4. Hunt for the icon you need
  5. Click the icon
  6. Release mouse
  7. Resume typing

That is a lot of work! And you probably do that quite a bit during a typical day.

Lately I’ve been using Mousefeed (http://www.mousefeed.com/) to help me break this habit.  Mousefeed is an Eclipse plugin which will encourage you to use the keyboard.  If you click on a menu item with the mouse it will display in a small popup the appropriate keyboard shortcut.

Unfortunately the author has stopped development on the plugin. The site mentions it works in Eclipse 3.3 but I downloaded the Mousefeed jar file and dropped it into my Eclipse ‘dropins’ folder (C:\eclipse\dropins\com.mousefeed_1.0.0.jar) and it seems to work fine with Eclipse 3.5 and the latest CFEclipse.

By using the keyboard I can eliminate the steps above required by the mouse and dramitically speed up my coding!

FYI - I’ll be presenting on more time saving tips like this at cf.Objective and CFUnited!