Editing Code in Emacs

Emacs shines when packages combine to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Changing basic key bindings is the quickest way to vitiate that symbiosis.

Unfortunately.

And while they may be old school, traditional, and orthodox, they are by no means idiosyncratic. They’re widely supported: readline , bash, everywhere on macos, even modern browsers. Eg you can actually paste in bash: try killing something with C-w or C-k, and paste it back using C-y. Or transpose arguments using C-M-t. Navigate suggestions in Firefox using C-n and C-p. Bash even supports undo using C-/.

All to say: learning emacs movement keys pays off.

This is definitely true. The thing is that using the mouse is a habit, and until you break it, people find themselves instinctively using it in situations where it would be better to use the keyboard. So the 'hard' mouse disable is more of a 'going cold-turkey' type thing to try and break the habit. I agree that once it's broken it makes sense to relax this.

(This is my understanding at least; I'm open to correction.)

I'm a lover of Vim bindings, and so I appreciate keyboard controls, but where Vim enables working with files and text in a general and powerful way, avy enables avoiding one click with the mouse. I don't use Vim to avoid the mouse, I use it so I can hack some Vim macros together when I'm editing text on a text-level. Vim (or Emacs) is an eternal tool that can do big things, avy just positions my cursor.

What I love about functionality like this is it's completely generic. It's just text. I don't need any lsp support to get me "go to def" or something. I can open a file in a language I've never seen before and use the exact same interface I'm used to to navigate around.

Maybe if I combine it with eye tracking so I can limit letter assignment to the foveated region I can reduce the cycle count and make this style of navigation win.