Most people who aren't used to (decent) tab completion interfaces have this misconception. Let me guess: you've never really spent much time in a CLI like bash

Most people who aren't used to (decent) tab completion interfaces have this misconception. Let me guess: you've never really spent much time in a CLI like bash or Emacs? It's incredibly powerful to try tabbing into what might be related. Emacs tab completion (variables, functions, buffer names, etc) in particular is very nice in that you can type part of what you're looking for and anything that matches in any part will show up in the completion list (eg M-x -mode<TAB> will get you a completion list of anything containing "-mode" anywhere in the function name). As Steve Yegge points out in Effective Emacs (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs), mousing through a menu is very inefficient, even when you're learning or exploring. They don't scale well, can't possibly cover all the options, and once you've dug down two or three deep, you're sort of trapped. Whereas with decent tab completion, you can backward-kill or just plain <DEL> your way back up the heierarchy.