I have a few friends in the career of "design" and they simply cannot comprehend my affinity for my favorite editor, Vim. Now, I have proof for them that I'm not an idiot! A recent Slashdot article has pointed me to a blog by Paul Tyma discusses the usefulness of the keyboard as for exclusive use for those of us who spend most of their day manipulating text.
I write programs for a living and, dang it, I don't really need my mouse a lot of the time. My most common use of the mouse is when I need to browse the web. Otherwise, I can Alt-Tab/Apple-Tab/Apple-` my way around and use key strokes to do my most critical tasks. Anyway, Tyma is right on...except, his objection to the claim that Emacs was created to scare children is right out. Emacs was created not only to frighten children but also as a means of illegal torture for enemy non-combatants.
oooo... that's GUI
I live and die by keyboard shortcuts, but I've got to have a fully integrated IDE like JBuilder, Visual Studio, or Eclipse. I rarely use the mouse in an IDE, though. I use keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything, such as switching between tabs/windows, compiling, debugging, etc. Some IDEs actually make intelligent use of the mouse. When you move the mouse cursor over a variable, for example, some IDE's will show you the documentation or allow you to quickly jump to its definition.
But my main beef with keyboard shortcuts is that nobody can agree which keys represent which shortcuts. I'll be in one IDE and I'll push a set of keys thinking that my project will compile and somehow I've instead managed to launch a nuclear bomb because I was in a different IDE than I thought I was in.