Having spent a lot of time in emacs, vim and plan9's acme(1) editor (which uses the mouse heavily): The speed is about the same for most work. The time spent t

Having spent a lot of time in emacs, vim and plan9's acme(1) editor (which uses the mouse heavily): The speed is about the same for most work. The time spent thinking is the major task which happens, so the time it takes to edit your buffer is not that dominating. When you have unique reordering which you only have to do once, the mouse in acme(1) tend to beat emacs/vi. One subtle trick is that the acme cursor sits "between" characters, not "on" a character, which makes selection of text much faster. Also, if you click on eg, { it marks to the }. You need a precise mouse and some acceleration to make mouse flicks possible, but then it absolutely rocks. On the other hand, whenever you have a repeated task, you are better off programming a solution. Here macros or vi move-style comes in handy. In acme(1), you use the built-in command language (which is close to the sam(1) command language). It is a bit easier in emacs/vi I think, but only a bit. disclaimer: I didn't really time myself, so there may be a perception mistake in these observations. But I don't find one method vastly faster than the other. In a typical editing session, the mix of tasks makes sure that on average the editing speed is about the same. OTOH, I have enough muscle memory for emacs-fluency, so a newcomer would probably be faster on the mouse than in a keyboard-binding-experienced vi/emacs programmer.