For me it's not about wasting time, it's that frequently switching between mouse and keyboard is a repetitive stress injury waiting to happen. The accumulated damage that can occur after doing it everyday for a few years really creeps up on you.

I concur. If you already have RSI like me (thank you Blizzard games), reaching for the mouse is literally a pain point already.

You're not an outlier... The only time when editing takes longer than thinking is when you're processing textual data dump files in their various shapes and forms (logs, database dumps as SQL, etc.). For code thinking definitely takes longer than actually editing :)

I think it depends on the task at hand, whether you are jumping around or focused on a long piece; exploring or debugging ...

Anyway, not everything takes place in the editor.

"The acme user interface for programmers" (http://acme.cat-v.org/) is a good inspiration. It focuses on mouse usage and shows how most systems are as nicely integrated as they could be.

I have hacked together a setup that mimicks acme using a tiling wm, vim (and its amazing remote features), a plumber and a terminal that can send the current selection to the plumber. This way I use vim as I like but I can send it some path:line:col from anywhere with a right click.

Could you explain more about integrating acme ideas into a tiling wm, or possibly share your dotfiles? I've tried doing that with i3, but the window manager has less than optimal mouse support to say the least, and wmii is dead.

See https://st.suckless.org/patches/right_click_to_plumb/

The setup requires:

- a terminal that is aware of its shell current working directory (OSC7) (I use st or tmux and zsh)

- a terminal that would call a plumbing command with the current selection on a mouse right click (I use st or tmux)

- a plumbing command that would call the appropriate action given the selection string passed in (I use a script and plan9 plumber)

- an editor that supports being called from the plumbing script (I use acme or vim remote with vim-fetch plugin)

- an eventual tiling wm or tmux for window management

My dotfiles aren't public but I guess I could try and package them if you're interested. PM me at the email on the suckless page.

It's not about wasting time, pointing devices are less precise which means they demand more attention and are less flexible.

Going with your theory, I'd say that pointing devices are more precise which means they require more brain-CPU cycles to operate ... pixel-space is large and you must position it within some delta of the target widget you're trying to use.

Whereas in emacs, say, it's a quick "C-x o" to change to the next/other buffer.

Right, they're more precise and less accurate.