Hands-free mice for programmers?

Question

The standard setup for programmers really requires three hands: two for the keyboard, and one for the mouse. I'm not blessed with an extra hand, so my hands have to shift from mouse to keyboard to mouse.

But plenty of hands-free mice exist: either by moving your head, by speaking, or by using feet.

I'm not particularly handicapped, but I'm always interested in trying different and potentially better ways to do things. Have any of you used hands-free mice for programming? How well has it worked out?

Answer 1

Has been covered, at least partially

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/762033/is-it-practical-to-program-with-your-feet

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87999/voice-recognition-software-for-developers

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1837353/one-handed-coding-tablet-special-keyboard-one-handed-typing

Answer 2

The main advantage of the mouse is that it's a dual accuracy interface: large movements can be obtained by moving your arm, while high accuracy pointing can be obtained with your wrist and fingers. No other device allows you this dual level, while at the same time allowing a resting position (e.g. not having to lift your arm in the sky to touch the screen, for example). A trackpad is not good either: it allows you finger-based interaction (fine movements), but no arm-based (large movements). Also, humans are very sensitive on the fingertips, and all that sliding on a surface is annoying after a while.

If you think about it, the mouse is the perfect device for the physical characteristics of our motion and interaction tools, namely the arms/hands.

So to answer your question, any other input device you can find is just a replacement, not an improvement. The mouse is already the best in its category, and I doubt anything more practical can be devised for desktop interaction.

Answer 3

You can learn the shortcut keys for many of your common tasks in your IDE. Most things that can be done with a mouse while you're programming can be done with a keyboard. If there are commands that can't be accessed with a mouse (can't think of one in Visual Studio or Emacs atleast) and if your IDE supports macros, you might consider learning how to code up a couple of those.

You might try ActiveWords. It's a productivity app that runs in the background and allows you to easily create short, word-based commands that will execute any kind of operation on your computer.

Answer 4

I had this idea:

Tounge driven mouse

The mouse would be of form of a chewing gum, and by chewing it vaoius directions you could control the mouse :)

Answer 5

Check out what the CamBang application here: http://www.julius-eckert.com/projects/

It's pretty sweet looking but still under development.

Answer 6

Just lose the mouse entirely. Obviously the primary use is for web browsing (there are ways to minimize that need too, like vimperator) but for the majority of actual coding you can just forget the mouse is there entirely and probably gain productivity.

Answer 7

I think what you're looking for is called VIM.

Answer 8

Try the roller mouse, perhaps? Not entirely hands-free, but gives you mouse-equivalent functionality while keeping your hands on or very close to the keyboard.