Every senior developer will tell you to learn keyboard shortcuts. Memorize Vim motions. Never touch your mouse. But what if they're wrong?
The Keyboard Cult
You know the advice if you've been around cracked engineers enough.
"Learn your keyboard shortcuts, never leave the home row, the mouse is a crutch for beginners."
The perspective is always the same with these folks - real programmers don't click.
And look, I get it. There's something satisfying about ciw to change a word or dd to delete a line. Keyboard cultists have optimized their keystrokes per minute and they want you to know about it.
But here's the thing: they're optimizing for the wrong metric entirely.
The Problem Nobody Talks About: Your Body
RSI, carpal tunnel, arthritis - these ain't no joke and many programmers experience one of these issues at some point in their life. They're career-enders hiding in plain sight and engineers really don't talk about them nearly enough.
After a few years into learning how to code, I went down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole. Started with a Microsoft Sculpt and the split layout definitely helped with the weird finger contortions that standard keyboards demand.
The difference was staggering and it helped me go from only being able to code for 1 hour daily without pain to 6-8 hours no problem! Unfortunately, the Microsoft Sculpt is no longer in production and the overall build quality is not great. So you'd be lucky to find a fully functioning one on ebay that doesn't have some quirks to it.
I've recently upgraded to a Kinesis M-Wave, which has the same feel as the sculpt but with a much better build quality and a version purpose-built for Macs. It has bluetooth and wired connections - unlike the sculpt. If you lose the tiny usb receiver for your sculpt - you're shit outta luck and your keyboard is completely bricked (unless you want to do some soldering and electronics work).
Overall - did these keyboards help? Absolutely! But you know what helped more?
Spending less time on the keyboard altogether
Think about what keyboards actually demand from your hands. Those three-key shortcuts like Cmd+Shift+Option+K? Your fingers are doing yoga poses they were never designed for. Even the most ergonomic setups are just making an inherently unnatural activity slightly less terrible (the awkward to learn Kinesis Advantage may be an exception).
Context Switching
Yes - staying on your keyboard can minimize context-switching between devices. Every reach for the mouse is friction, wasted motion and broken flow.
But what if I told you that something changed in 2024/2025 that has the potential to completely flip this paradigm.
What if you stayed on your mouse instead?
This sounds insane until you realize: the keyboard isn't the only way to get text onto a screen anymore. Speech-to-text tools like WisprFlow and SuperWhisper have gotten insanely good. We're talking near-perfect transcription at speeds that would make a court stenographer cry.
The Voice + Mouse Paradigm
Here's my setup: a Logitech G502 with every button mapped to something useful, plus voice-to-text for actual content creation. One hand, one device, maximum output.
The magic is in the bindings:
- Scroll tilt left → Enter: Confirmations without reaching across the keyboard
- Scroll tilt right → Mission Control: Window navigation that trackpad users take for granted
- Far side button → Option+Space: Triggers speech-to-text (my secret weapon)
- Button below scroll wheel → Shift+Tab: Cursor/Claude Code mode switching in editors
One relaxed hand position. Four keybinds. Zero finger gymnastics.
The Real Productivity Metric
Here's what the keyboard cultists gets wrong: they measure productivity in keystrokes per minute. But the actual bottleneck isn't your input speed anymore - it's the gap between your thoughts and the screen.
When you're typing, you think at typing speed. Your brain literally throttles itself to match your fingers. It's like trying to have a conversation through a telegraph.
When you're speaking? You think at thinking speed.
Consider: when you're explaining something to a colleague, you naturally convey more information density than you ever would typing. Ideas flow, tangents connect and the full depth of your thought makes it all the way through. Modern AI transcription can keep up with speech faster than most humans could even process and certainly faster than you could possibly type.
The Agent-First Workflow
When you're coding with Claude or Cursor, you're not hands-on-keys writing code. You're describing what you want. You're reviewing, directing, iterating. That's a conversation and conversations are better spoken than typed.
The mouse handles navigation: clicking through files, selecting code blocks, approving changes. The voice handles intent: "refactor this function to use async/await" or "add error handling for the edge case where the user isn't authenticated."
And here's the real freedom: you don't even need to be at your desk. Walk around the room. Pace while you think. Your agent is still listening, still working. Try doing that with Vim motions.
Obviously, when you need to get surgical - fixing typos, tweaking some CSS - the kind of precision work that demands direct manipulation go keyboard-first. That's still the right tool for that job.
But if you're not doing precision edits? If you're directing, reviewing, describing? Voice + mouse wins. It's not even close.
The Tech
You don't need my exact setup. The principles are simple:
- Get a mouse with programmable buttons: The G502 is great, but anything with scroll-wheel tilt and extra side buttons works.
- Map the buttons that matter: Enter, Mission Control/window switching and your speech-to-text trigger are the essentials.
- Pick a good speech-to-text tool: WisprFlow has the lowest latency but requires you to be online. SuperWhisper is great when on a flight or dealing with slow internet.
- Buy a wireless mic: I use a DJI Mic Mini so I can close my laptop and freely walk around while talking - but your Macbook mic is best if you're stationary and keep your Macbook opened.
The learning curve is about 3-4 days before it feels natural. The wrist relief is almost immediate if you sit at the right height and can be further improved with a memory foam wrist pad.
Thought to Action > Keystrokes Per Minute
The keyboard maximalists will tell you this is all copium and grifting. That real developers don't need voice input. That you're giving up control by not typing every character yourself.
They're measuring the wrong thing. The goal isn't keystrokes per minute - it's thoughts to action per minute. It's getting what's in your head onto the screen with the least friction and the least damage to your body.
For me, that's voice and a well-configured mouse. My wrists have never been happier and I've never been more productive.
Use whatever works for you. But maybe, just maybe - give your keyboard a rest.
Vim users can stay mad.