That's a pretty limited view of the capacity of computers. I'd bet a good 60% of your editing commands are cursor motion. So one pretty obvious improvement is to just look at foo, then do your edit. heck, it's still called cut and paste, how about pushing words around on the screen? not with the mouse, but with your hand on the screen.
The perfect ui is literally, read my mind and do what I want. I doubt we'll see fmri-at-a-distance in my lifetime, but I can indicate my wishes many many ways.
Also, there's some evidence that moving your hands to the mouse is faster, you just notice it, because it's effortless, whereas working out the key combination to move the cursor chews up clock cycles. (http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html)
And even if you are faster with the keyboard, it probably took you years to get as fast as you are. If programmers can provide a ui to get users to some sizeable fraction of your editing speed in days instead of years... it's worth it. The only real risk is if the fastest of the new ui category can't edit as quickly as the fastest of the traditional. Really, there's no way your hands can compete with looking at what you want.
The perfect ui is literally, read my mind and do what I want. I doubt we'll see fmri-at-a-distance in my lifetime, but I can indicate my wishes many many ways.
Also, there's some evidence that moving your hands to the mouse is faster, you just notice it, because it's effortless, whereas working out the key combination to move the cursor chews up clock cycles. (http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html) And even if you are faster with the keyboard, it probably took you years to get as fast as you are. If programmers can provide a ui to get users to some sizeable fraction of your editing speed in days instead of years... it's worth it. The only real risk is if the fastest of the new ui category can't edit as quickly as the fastest of the traditional. Really, there's no way your hands can compete with looking at what you want.