Earlier quoted context omitted.
Touchpads exist. A mouse (or rather, a floating cursor) is often a much more efficient way to get your cursor in position than slamming your arrow or hjkl keys multiple dozens of times.
Touchpads don’t solve for muscle memory for the same reasons mouses don’t. And yeah, of course. Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around. In vim, for example, there are many more text-centric ways of moving around a document. Using a keyboard is generally much faster. Try using your daily code editor without any hot keys at all. No F5, no Ctrl-s, none of that.
Uh, what? I have my touchpad tuned so that one swipe from top left to bottom right is exactly equal to going from the top left to bottom right of my display. And aside from that, how do you think people play FPS games, that they think about every mouse movement and then do it?
> Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around.
> Try using your daily code editor
One of the few usecases where you can do that, and in general is extremely heavily biased towards keyboard use.
Having a touchpad or mouse is great because it is adaptable and versatile. It doesn’t require the application developer to have accommodated every step a keyboard user wants to optimize for. Not to mention there is no “quickly” using your keyboard with one hand if you constantly need to hold modifier keys :)
> Using a keyboard is generally much faster.
That was my point, it is until it isn’t. On any application without Vim or EMacs bindings I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there, going taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap with horrid inefficiency.