I will note that I feel much more productive in LaTeX or more powerful editors. I think some of that, however, is due to the fact that my brain is contently bu

I will note that I feel much more productive in LaTeX or more powerful editors. I think some of that, however, is due to the fact that my brain is contently busy on the cognitively fulfilling task to develop a regex to do this find-replace instead of frustratedly waiting on my slow motor cortex as it drives a mouse cursor across the screen. See also the studies in [1], previously discussed on HN. I do a lot of work in a myriad of vendor-provided software with various degrees of quality for industrial control systems. I'm always grateful when they (1) don't mess with OS-provided text entry commands like tab stops to move between fields, F2 to start editing, enter or shift-enter to accept, copy paste, etc. and (2) provide a plain-text import-export utility. Literally today, I was faced with the barely unusual requirement to add a total of 1200 logic elements among 5 sets of 20 very similar lines of ladder logic to a program , I was grateful for the ability to do those 5 basic rungs once, export that section of logic, and run some regexes to generate all 100 rungs instead of being stuck using the mouse and clicking the add contact icon, scrolling to select the tag in the list, clicking the add coil icon, and scrolling to its tag, ad nauseam. A task that would have taken hours instead took just a couple minutes! However, I have observed that I feel better about these productivity wins and worse about some pragmatic drudge work than an objective analysis from the clock actually supports. Instead of boasting about the 'big win' on HN, had I been forced to spend half a day entering that logic manually, I would probably have complained about the vendor's awful UI for weeks, denigrating their hardware at the next project's quote phase. Realistically, though, it wouldn't have taken that much effort to do it manually. Similarly, I have no doubt that when trying to do something 4 times, it's often faster to just do it manually all 4 times, rather than copy-paste, keyboard navigation, find-replace, and edit machinations to make that happen. [1]: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/