I've never understood the sentiment that using a mouse is bad. I see blog posts all the time about how a programmer's job is more thinking than writing code and/or writing good programs is also about taking out just as much code as you put in. So if writing programs is a deliberate and methodical process that - I'd argue it's also slow. Why then is there antithesis that mice slow you down and you need keyboard shortcuts to be faster and more productive?

Maybe I'm just an old-schooler?

I suspect a lot more of it is perception than people imagine: keeping your hands on the keyboard all the time seems like it intuitively must be faster. Early research in human-computer interfaces suggests that this isn't actually the case, though. From 1989:

"We've done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: (1) Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. (2) The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding."

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

It's very easy on HN to find the pro-keyboard arguments. The pro-mouse argument is, more or less, that the context switch that really costs you time isn't the one involving the mouse, but the one involving remembering and/or finding the keyboard shortcut or function key.

Vim and Emacs style movement commands are faster than the mouse in certain contexts, but I'm dubious that's universally true. "I want to jump to line 123" is easy, but what about "I want to move the cursor to the open brace character right there"? No matter how much of a seasoned pro you may be, you're going to have to think for a moment about how to do to that: "let me count the '{' characters between the current point and where I want it to be. Three, so '3/{'." The mouse may make you move your hand, but it doesn't make you have to stop and count.

(It's also worth remembering that while mouse selection may not be as rich as "select within brackets" type commands, nearly all editors do have basic semantic mouse selection: double-click and drag to select by word, triple-click and drag to select by line. This can be a lot faster than you might think.)

This plugin solves the curly brace issue. I find if there is something you find repeatedly annoying, there is probably a plugin to solve it. That or you suddenly have an interesting side project!