Vertical mouse or a joystick?

[qyot27]

The trusty Microsoft optical mouse I've been using for the last ~12 years is probably about to give up the ghost. A few days ago it suddenly started deactivating itself (and either not turning back on for 10-20 seconds or requiring me to unplug it and plug it back in), lagging, and disconnecting and reconnecting itself randomly.

So I've been looking at replacements, and found several models of vertical mice being sold. This piqued my interest, and the ones I was looking at (the Etekcity and J-Tech Scroll Endurance models, which are probably just rebranded versions of the same mouse) are less than $20, but the single nagging problem is that the dimensions aren't consistently reported on them. They're reportedly 3.15 inches tall as measured in the images, but the text says 87mm (which would be 3.425 inches, not 3.15).

This is a problem, because my keyboard tray has exactly 80mm of clearance (3.15 inches if rounded up - it's technically 3.149606). So even if it does happen to be 3.15 inches tall, it would be an extremely tight fit or just barely too big for the tray.

If anyone has one of these mice and can tell me exactly how tall they are, I'd greatly appreciate it.



The other thought that crossed my mind (after seeing a much more expensive joystick-style mouse by 3M for $50-60), was that if all of these options are going to be too big for the keyboard tray and require me to reach to the top of my desk to use it, I might as well go whole hog and get an actual standard joystick (some of which are half the price of the 3M thing) and set up JoyToKey so that I can use it as essentially a power mouse.

Thoughts?

[Asmodian]

A joystick makes a very bad mouse in my experience. Have you have ever tried to use a game controller to control a mouse pointer? They have very accurate mini joysticks and it is still quite slow and imprecise. The vertical mice are a much better option.

[qyot27]

I actually have set up a PlayStation 2 controller to do that before (usually I only have it set up for games, or in one instance, to facilitate seeking in VirtualDub). I figured the alienness of using it as a mouse substitute was mostly because I'm not used to using only my thumbs to control a mouse pointer; it might've also been an issue with JoyToKey - I went looking for alternatives and found AntiMicro, which seemed to provide better accuracy when I used it under Ubuntu...I just need to compile it myself for Windows. With a standard joystick (I was looking at the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro), I'd be using my whole hand and forearm to do it.

I may very well do both. Office Depot and Staples usually have mice and whatnot set up for display, I'll have to see if any of these are available at the ones near me.

[qyot27]

I figured I better update this.

My trip to Office Depot shortly after I posted last resulted in me actually purchasing the joystick I was looking at. They didn't have any set up for demonstrations, but they were selling it for almost $10 less than the price listed on their website, so I just decided to go ahead and buy it and try it out. I've been using it as my pointing device for the last two weeks.

I was correct in assuming the experience would be different with an actual joystick vs. a gamepad's mini-sticks. It does have more tactile resistance than a mouse, and this results in the pointer movement being more of a gliding motion than the quick darting that a mouse gives you, but the remapping programs can adjust the speed and sensitivity so that it's very similar to mouse speeds (and with the model I was looking at and eventually bought, there are four axes, so I have the main set configured for the slower, more deliberate pointing, and the secondary two set up for much faster movement so I can 'throw' the pointer across the screen in as nearly an instantaneous way as I could with a mouse). One place that the joystick is actually superior to a mouse is that perfect linear movement is extremely simple to perform with a joystick - I could never do that with a mouse. My old mouse also only had a vertical scroll wheel, whereas the Hat switch/POV stick on the joystick is 8-way, and I have it configured to do both vertical and horizontal scroll.

It does use generally different muscle memory than a mouse does (the only thing that is really close to 1:1 with a mouse is the left click, which I set up the trigger to do and thus still use my index finger for), but it still feels natural. The first couple days I had to resist the urge to unconsciously grab the mouse, but the coolness factor of using the joystick helped with that (and said coolness factor mostly wore off after a few days). After a week or so, I barely grab the mouse at all.

I wasn't really interested in buying a vertical mouse or joystick for ergonomic reasons, but I had recently been having soreness in the little finger on my right hand, and after just a couple days of using the joystick, it was noticeably improved. Now, after two weeks, that issue is nearly gone.

My only real gripe is that my desk is kind of terrible, so (as I anticipated) I do have to reach to grab the joystick, and this has a tendency to make my arm tired. That's not the stick's fault, though, and I'd more than likely have the exact same problem with the vertical mice if they were too tall to go on the tray and also had to be on top of the desk. I just need a better desk (which I knew anyway; this thing also has terrible access to the terminal, so doing anything that requires plugging something into the back of the terminal is infuriating).