Comment by iLemming

It really is not so much about keyboard vs. mouse - power users vs. average Joes. That all is just a discombobulation that distracts from the main issue and the issue is the accessibility of plain text.

Majority of computer professionals (programmers included) come to appreciate a single fundamental truth about their field way too late into their careers. That the most basic foundational unit, the substrate they need to conquer is text. Everything stems from it. We have to deal with text our entire lives. It doesn't matter where that text appears - in web browsers, in Jira, in Slack, in terminal, in PDFs, Word or LaTeX documents. Code by the way is just structured text. The feeling of empowerment and liberation when you can deal with text on your own terms is a disproportionate multiplier. That's why using multiple cursors feature for the first time feels so amazing, even though the practical cases for it are not that common.

And when I say "text", I don't only describe the process of "grabbing some text" and "piping it" into another process, or manipulating it. It's not only about the input, the act of consuming text is equally, if not more important.

We argue that keyboard-driven UIs are more efficient for the input, but hundreds of memorized shortcuts can't really fix the fundamental problem.

Vendors are designed to own you and ownership can take different forms. Slack app that doesn't let you easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns you. Jira that forces you to use their stupid, quirky wysiwyg editor - owns you. Note-taking app that keeps the data on the cloud ain't your friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction of text requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in, it is behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. Information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay there longer - search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.

And when you get to that point, you'd feel helpless - all your knowledge and muscle memory can't help you there - not only the app is not favoring power-user experience, it's forcing everyone downgrade to the "average Joe" levels.

Most popular editors and IDEs don't give you direct leverage over plain text either, at least not without the effort from your side. Shortcuts, popups, UI elements in the IDE at best are local drivers - you can't easily grab a thing from the outside and feed it to your LLM context in the middle of a task, or insert within a comment in the code - you have to switch, copy, paste, deal with format inconsistencies, manual conversion, etc. Then we keep bargaining what method is the best, fastest and most convenient - using the mouse or keeping the fingers on the home row, modality or complex shortcuts. All for the sake of the problem that's artificially enforced on our workflows.

Terminal-heavy users eventually start appreciating the leverage Unix philosophy grants them over text, but that's still contained within locality, they still have to constantly jump around, while eventually figuring out ways for automating some aspects of it.

Point is - do not give in to the status quo. Liberate your text - deal with it on your terms. Get annoyed whenever you need to switch back and forth just for the sake of finding the piece you need and moving it around - it should be instantaneous and instinctual. Like a boxer moving in a ring and casually throwing heavy punches. Long-time Vim and Emacs users "get it", even though they often don't follow through - some things just never become gratifying instincts. Sometimes, even the opposite forms - like redundant muscle memories. Some outright would reject using a new app because it messes with one shortcut they keep accidentally pressing. Sometimes, I wish there was an agreed standard for every UI - to have only the core, commonly used keys pre-set, while making everything else configurable.