Basically I have two modes two use my hands. Quake mode, when my hand is on the left side of the keyboard and my right is on the mouse, and coding mode, when both my hands are on the keyboard. In the latter it isn't easy to change to mouse and in most of the programs it is causing me a considerable discomfort, because typing has a priority in this mode. To change between the two is just a bad option.
I'm using Visual Studio and Eclipse on regular basis, and I have an almost 100% coverage of short cuts within these IDEs. I don't see why a GUI IDE should lack of the most important feature for a programmer, to be able to use with keyboard only. In addition, emacs is an IDE, I would argue, that one of the coolest IDE I ever seen because of its almost infinite expansibility. It's a complete shell you know...

On 25 April 2012 01:58, F i L <witte2008@gmail.com> wrote:

Robert Clipsham wrote:

There's far too much mouse usage in IDEs for me. You mean I have to move my hands away from the keyboard to do a find and replace? Pfft :<

MonoDevelop has a Vi mode, and most functions in IDE's are mapped to keyboard shortcuts anyways. Ctrl-F for find/replace, Ctrl-K-C/U for commenting, etc... there's probably even keys do navigate the project overview.

I don't see what's so bad with moving your hands around a bit anyways. Don't you have to move your hands away from "home position" to use the arrow keys to move around with a keyboard anyways? The muscle memory for moving to the mouse feels very similar to me.