Thank you for making the mouse a thing in a keyboard driven world. As someone who grew up with gaming and learned IT as a result I never was able to fully give up on the mouse during my daily workflows. I admire people who can use VIM etc only by keyboard, but my muscle memory just says: mouse.
Thanks for establishing something that embraces this.
You sound like a Windows admin living in a Linux/BSD world.
I struggle to do everything with Powershell, but almost everything I do has a mouse input. I use a gaming mouse for system administration - a Razer Naga Epic with the 12 thumb buttons.
They're a 3x4 array; I bind them to:
Row One
1. F5
2. Up arrow
3. F2
Row Two
4. Left arrow
5. Down arrow
6. Right arrow
Row Three
7. Tab
8. Delete
9. Backspace
Row Four
10. Enter
11. Spacebar
12. ESC
I can do the work of 2-3 admins, and I'm faster than poorly-written scripts.
You should use whatever works for you but this strikes me as very bizarre I have to admit. I started out with a mouse as well and I can see this being something I would have attempted if I hadn't just put my head down and forced myself to get used to keeping my hands on the keyboard.
As I said, it would be nice to be able to do everything with Powershell (or even Cygwin), but the every module isn't available for every version of Powershell, and the last 2 versions of Powershell don't work with some older (but still supported) versions of Windows.
Want to control you audio from Powershell? There's a cmdlet[1] for that. But it only works on Powershell 4.0 and higher. And PS 4.0 is only available on Win7, (not Win8) Win8.1, and Server 2008-2012.
So on my gaming PC, where I thought putting Win8 Enterprise from my MSDN would be a good idea, I can only change the volume via mouse, or keyboard volume buttons.
I'm only slightly ashamed to admit I like using a mouse. I get that some people can work faster with all-keyboard controls. I use both. I also like GUIs for certain things. The only thing I don't like GUIs for is when there is some repetitive thing that I have to do 50 times a day and would require 3 or 4 clicks or menu selections - for those I'd always rather have a single command. Sometimes I make those into shell scripts that I can click with my mouse though!
Might already be familiar with it, but if you aren't, you should check out sikuli script [1] for when you have a repetitive GUI task you have to perform that can't be directly scripted. I've used it to script some really complex workflows through GUI's
It's also just weird and interesting to program something to move through a GUI as fast as is possible
Yeah, getting the scripts to run and be robust is definitely an art sort of thing, but I've used it to create what amounts to a CLI's for legacy apps that you could only interface with through GUI's.
It's also fun to run across stuff like "Oh, the developer of this platform wasn't expecting me to be able to respond to a window within 20ms of it popping up on the screen."
Be interested to see what you think, if you have time to leave a comment
Didn't have all the time I wanted today but played with 'hello world' samples and it's a fun new way of scripting for me. I don't have an immediate use for it but next time I feel something needs automation I'm definitely going to give it a go.
Thanks for establishing something that embraces this.