I'm middle-aged if I were going to live 104 years. Been using these things since I was 14. My first computer was not even a PC, nor a game console. I don't know what it was, except that the keyboard was in English (I'm Spanish) and the screen was bright green on black. It had some kind of precursor of MS DOS installed, or so I remember. I used the WordStar word processor on the thing to write my papers. I printed them and I had to manually add the tildes on every “ñ” (¡yo escribo en español, señora!) with a pen.
I've spent my life in front of these things: programming, tinkering, and writing novels, two of which I even finished. I've never been a radical proponent of anything. I'm a practical kind of person. I used MS DOS and Windows because that is what I needed at my job, and I didn't delve into Linux first and then FreeBSD until 3 years ago, outraged at the lack of customizability (God lord! What a word!) of Windows 11 GUI.
During my extensive life, I've learned to use many keyboard shortcuts because it was useful. I know every standard editing key combination and use them proficiently, but I've never been an enemy of the mouse. I like animals, both as pets and as hamburgers. Coming to the Unix-like systems' world I discovered that there was a race of people called power-users. I had never heard of them before. Some of them seemed to be radically anti-mouse and anti-GUI, yet, curiously, none of them used the real terminal, which is absolutely possible to do in any Unix-like system (Ctrl+Alt+F3, enjoy!). Install Tmux, an advanced shell like Fish, Midnight Commander, and Browsh to surf the web (I've never used it, but there you go) and abandon the GUI, false preachers!
Anyways... I wanted to be as cool as them cool guys, so I learned to use tiling-window systems like Kronhkite or PopOS's tiling extension for Gnome. They are neat because windows are placed for you on the screen in a sensible manner and that is practical.
Additionally, and now we are finally getting to the point of this post, I've tried to improve my keyboard skills, so as to be more “productive” (WTF does that mean? WTF am I producing, characters?), but I find myself lacking.
For instance, I love VI, but most of the time I forget if I'm on Normal Mode or Insert Mode, my brain makes the wrong guess, and the result is a mess and my blood pressure getting higher. Also, I use three screens, Plasma and Kronhkite. My active window's border is highlighted in red and yet sometimes I look at another window and start “writing” there, which results in a mess in the actual active window. Finally, to navigate through my tiled windows I use command+arrows, but if the window is on another screen, I first have to go there with ctrl+alt+arrows (before, my combination was command+shift+arrows, but that was even worse because I use command+ctrl+arrow to move a window to another screen), so it's a common occurrence that I press the wrong combination and the active window ends up being the one in my living room that faces the street. Sometimes I even freeze because I know what I want to do but my brain can't produce the correct key combination.
I feel shame. Should I accept that the keyboard is not for me and resign myself to spending my life clicking the mouse?
I've spent my life in front of these things: programming, tinkering, and writing novels, two of which I even finished. I've never been a radical proponent of anything. I'm a practical kind of person. I used MS DOS and Windows because that is what I needed at my job, and I didn't delve into Linux first and then FreeBSD until 3 years ago, outraged at the lack of customizability (God lord! What a word!) of Windows 11 GUI.
During my extensive life, I've learned to use many keyboard shortcuts because it was useful. I know every standard editing key combination and use them proficiently, but I've never been an enemy of the mouse. I like animals, both as pets and as hamburgers. Coming to the Unix-like systems' world I discovered that there was a race of people called power-users. I had never heard of them before. Some of them seemed to be radically anti-mouse and anti-GUI, yet, curiously, none of them used the real terminal, which is absolutely possible to do in any Unix-like system (Ctrl+Alt+F3, enjoy!). Install Tmux, an advanced shell like Fish, Midnight Commander, and Browsh to surf the web (I've never used it, but there you go) and abandon the GUI, false preachers!
Anyways... I wanted to be as cool as them cool guys, so I learned to use tiling-window systems like Kronhkite or PopOS's tiling extension for Gnome. They are neat because windows are placed for you on the screen in a sensible manner and that is practical.
Additionally, and now we are finally getting to the point of this post, I've tried to improve my keyboard skills, so as to be more “productive” (WTF does that mean? WTF am I producing, characters?), but I find myself lacking.
For instance, I love VI, but most of the time I forget if I'm on Normal Mode or Insert Mode, my brain makes the wrong guess, and the result is a mess and my blood pressure getting higher. Also, I use three screens, Plasma and Kronhkite. My active window's border is highlighted in red and yet sometimes I look at another window and start “writing” there, which results in a mess in the actual active window. Finally, to navigate through my tiled windows I use command+arrows, but if the window is on another screen, I first have to go there with ctrl+alt+arrows (before, my combination was command+shift+arrows, but that was even worse because I use command+ctrl+arrow to move a window to another screen), so it's a common occurrence that I press the wrong combination and the active window ends up being the one in my living room that faces the street. Sometimes I even freeze because I know what I want to do but my brain can't produce the correct key combination.
I feel shame. Should I accept that the keyboard is not for me and resign myself to spending my life clicking the mouse?
. At the same time, my "desktop" almost always shows at least a few instances of 
