I'm not a Jedi
In this post James Kovacs is talking about becoming a ReSharper Jedi. Recently I attended a training class given by JP Boodhoo who is probably Obi Wan to these guys, if not Yoda himself.
I admit to being completely overwhelmed for most of the week, not the least reason being the obsession with this topic - Keyboard=Good Mouse=Bad.
I was shocked that someone would do training this way - after all, I was there to learn programming concepts, and that was greatly hindered by the fact that I just couldn't keep up.
But the real shock for me was how enthusiastic the class was (other than me that is). They took to it big time. Everyone wanted to learn which key combination did what and worked really hard at it. Well except for me. I gave up on that after the first day and was a lot happier.
Now, I've worked at call centers and collection agencies for most of my career, so I definitely appreciate how the keyboard is better when speed of input is the primary goal. You want your collectors or reps talking and typing and hitting the next call key even while hanging up as quickly and graciously as possible with the current call. I've got that. I've DONE that :)
But I can tell you for certain that in my programming career it is never the speed of clicking File | New that slows my development efforts. Or the speed of using the mouse to right click on the project and Add a Class. Sure hitting some key combination would be FASTER. But I just don't need that kind of speed. Most of my time is spent thinking. I'm a pretty fast typist when I'm actually putting some code down, but… I just don't see programming as a hand-eye coordination type of endeavor.
It is really a bit humbling to me. I imagine these guys are so much smarter than I am, that in their mind they have already written the next 3 classes and they just need to push them onto the disk as fast as they can so they can move on to the next project. Wow!