Spend a Day with Keyboard ONLY

I challenge you: for one day, hide your mouse and disable your touchpad. Spend the whole day doing your normal development work with a keyboard only.

I promise (unless your job is Photoshop or AutoCAD) you'll do just fine, and you'll learn some productivity tricks that may stick.

...back in 2002, I got a job as a student technician in a summer camp. We packed a PC and brought it to the camp. We brought everything we needed -- monitor, keyboard, printer, enough paper... we just forgot about the mouse. The next car from the city would arrive only a few days later, and I was in charge of the camp's only computer -- spreadsheets, invoices, cafeteria menus.

And I realized that I could use Word and Excel just fine. There are hotkeys for almost everything, and I learned them faster than I thought. I still use some! (yes, Word is notoriously backward compatible)

Now, I'm not asking you to learn the hotkeys of MS Word. Word and Excel were my daily tools in that summer camp. What are your daily tools? Your terminal is keyboard-first already. What else? IDE? Issue tracker? Messenger?

My bet is that if it's a tool created for developers, it has a "power user" mode that is keyboard-heavy. And it doesn't have to be Neovim! VS Code has a command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P is your portal to the kingdom of hotkeys); your browser has Ctrl+L, Ctrl+Tab and F5...

So it's not just that you can do everything without a mouse -- in many cases, you'll be more efficient this way -- your hands never leave the keyboard, so you do things faster and keep your focus (and I'm not mentioning that it just looks cool -- I always go "aaaaah" when I see a student demoing their code in Neovim).

So, if you were waiting for an incentive to learn the tricks, just create your incentive -- tomorrow, hide your mouse in a drawer, disable the touchpad, and start the day.