I’m most definitely here to advocate for its desirability. It’s easy - and a mistake - to take the position that it’s an old idea, and ipso facto one that is obsolete and inferior in a modern context. This wouldn’t be the first case of a great idea being lost because of an arbitrary (and essentially unrelated) decision made by a brainless monolith like u$, and the arguments in favour of three-button mice are manifold.
CAD in general - and, I suggest, EDA in particular - is much more demanding of the UI than the “dominant” (in market terms) applications like spreadsheets and word processing, and that extra finger’s worth of input ability makes a huge difference in speed and efficiency. In my own experience, in the 80s and 90s I used the old DOS version of EE Designer, which (though not using strokes) made excellent use of the three-button mouse. And I’d argue that one of factors in Apple’s early failure to seize a significant part of the CAD market was that they’d hobbled themselves with the one-button mouse (people tend to forget how many really stupid ideas Jobs had, and his notion of the “elegance” of a one-button mouse was one of them). There were companies that put out EDA software for Macs, and they all flopped.
We could dissect and analyze this issue at length, but at the end of the day it’s about how well it works. And if you talk to a Mentor user, you’ll get raves. You don’t have to work with strokes very long for your mind to automatically try to transfer the technique to the normal desktop windowing environment. Happens all that time that I’ll work for a while on a schematic or layout, switch back over to a non-CAD window, and catch myself trying to zoom or dismiss it with a swipe, bringing a “Damn! I can’t do that here!”
This is not a technique that a simple explanation can do proper justice to. You need to start using it, and then have your own “Where have you been all my life?” moment.
Oh - and thanks for that link. It’s a very nice introduction. For those not familiar with Mentor, it’s old-school grownup Unix workstation EDA. Used to be that schematic capture alone was a $25K per seat license. So those guys (and their users) were mos def not messing around.