I’ve been working on my terminal-only development environment for about 1-2 years already, and during this time, I’ve established some common tools that I use on a daily basis, among which are Helix editor, Zellij, lazygit, and a bunch of others. These tools are 99% keyboard-driven, and in order to work with them, you have to know a bunch of keybindings, each having its own ones to get familiar with. I consider myself an above-average-level Vim/Helix movement user.

I’ve discovered that there’s a problem for me that may arise when using keyboard-heavy tools. In particularly stressful situations where you need to act fast (an example would be a production hotfix), I very often find myself having my head completely empty. Like, your muscle memory just gets wiped out in a moment, and you don’t know how to do even some basic things. So the problem is that when I get into such stressful situations, I just forget the simplest movements and keymaps. Probably, I’m having trouble with stress management, but that’s still a thing when you need to act quickly in a stressful environment. What struck me recently is that there’s no such problem for me in VS Code, because to use VS Code, you must know nearly zero keymaps or shortcuts. Its visual accessibility makes it a very good match for me in such situations. You just click your mouse on things you see, and it’s all good. Having said that, this makes VS Code a perfect fit for me when under pressure.