as an emacs user, I find it extremely painful watching my colleagues clicking around in eclipse to navigate the code base[1]. It feels just so inefficient and slow.
[1] I assume eclipse actually has keyboard shortcuts, but they do not seem to be used by my eclipse-using colleagues.
Otherwise we would be playing RTS games with the keyboard. (I am a competitive RTS player, so I can almost instantly hit any point in the screen, which helps; a good mouse also helps a lot).
Pure TUI is not optimal, but it still beats available mouse-based interface. At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting.
I'm still waiting for a code reading program that supports drawing on top of the code and that would otherwise behave like an infinite desk with (searchable, linkable, annotateable) code printouts on it.
A GUI does not necessarily imply scrolling to find something.
A touchscreen is a nightmare for manipulating small text.
> For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools.
Well, if you never leave emacs/vim and related workflows, you never know anything else.
For writing code, yes, keyboard is best. For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it.
A particular example that stands out in the Linux world is GDB's CLI interface. It sucks. Its TUI is better, but still bad compared to a good GUI.