July 12, 2005

Clickety Click

I believe in right clicking.

A lot of smart people swear by keyboard macros. Their contention is that they are more efficient if they can keep both hands on the keyboard, and that mousing is inherently less efficient.

I am not so sure. Certainly manuevering through several clicks on a menu [File/Copy] can take longer than the key combination "Control-C". I think the efficiency gain is probably greatest if most of what you are doing is typing in a word processing or spreadsheet program, or if you do most of your work in one program where it pays off to memorize that program's unique key strokes. I prefer to use my memory cycles for other things.

The Keyboard vs Mouse debate is a religious war in the computer world, like the one between Mac lovers and Windows lovers.
Pro Mouse
Pro Keyboard

I think that having to memorize key stroke combinations is counter intuitive and counter productive, even if you have a great program like Active Words to create and manage memorized keystrokes. I believe there is a built-in connection between hand motion and brain function that is better served by mouse motion than by keystoking.

Of course, you have to be smart about your mouse use. One of the greatest conveniences of the Windows operating systems is the 'right click' or context menu. ( Additional reading )

A lot of programs will add entries to the context menu when you install them, either with or without your permission. Antivirus programs will add, "Scan with", encryption utilities will add "Encrypt with", file utilities might add "Open with". Zipping utilities in particular add lots of entries-Winrar added 6 entries to my context menu, Winzip added 4. Very confusing.

Still, I normally allow programs to modify the context menu, because I rely on it heavily, and don't want to lose fast access to functionality.

Lately however I had noticed a significant delay in menu opening in general, and right click menus in particular. This was extremely frustrating, I might wait as long as 20 seconds for a menu to appear. I googled the problem, and found out that some menu extensions can slow the appearance of context menus. One program specifically mentioned was Steganos, the encryption program I use.

I downloaded and ran ShellExView a program that lets you view and modify modifications made to the shell, or Windows user interface. I was easily able to disable shell extensions I did not want, without editing the registry. As with all tools of this sort, if you try it out, do not go blindly deleting or disabling things just because you don't know what they are, you could disable your system.

Some technical information about the Windows shell and shell extensions

Posted by Trigger Tech at July 12, 2005 9:06 AM Permalink

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