Now, third party software, is always going to be all over the place. Stuff that was largely built on Win32 components works fine, but "modern" stylized applications rarely have strong support.

There's plenty of TUIs for the dozens of you to use.

Agreed. Using keyboard keys to emulate a mouse cursor seems like it ought to be a last resort for graphical applications that lack proper accessibility affordances.

Contrast that with command palettes, accessibility controls, syntax tree navigation, and other approaches that rely on the names, content, and document structure that users already know rather than a special mode that displays two letter codes that must be read each time or memorized. Many of these other approaches also allow users to activate buttons, menu items, and links that are outside the current viewport or hidden in menus which reduces the overall number of "clicks" required to perform those actions. The downside is that they can take longer to type than a two-letter code. Still, my guess is that for most people it would be overall more efficient to optimize for cognitive load than pure speed.

(Though in the long run, I suspect that improvements in eye-tracking will lead to hybrid systems that are both lower cognitive load and faster than any of these.)

[0] https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless

Homerow is like vimium but for your entire mac.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors/maintainers.

...which supports Vimium-style hints mode as well as the grid-based approach shown in this "Mouseless (app) explained in 80 seconds" video. It also has a very responsive maintainer.

Personally I like vimium's approach much better than the grid. Unfortunately not everything has a good accessibility tree (Zed sadly doesn't), but I just realized loading neru's page that I'm behind in versions. I haven't tried the "Native Vision OCR" addition to hints mode yet.

I also like having a trackpad right on the keyboard (using a SoflePLUS2 right now though I'm not totally sold on column stagger). Then I can use a real pointing device with only a slight movement of one hand. In the Mouseless video, the creator has tried to minimize the distance by putting the mouse between the halves of his keyboard, but I think he's both compromised the keyboard position to ease using the mouse (arms wide and parallel with wrists turned inward rather than arms converging toward a more splayed keyboard with somewhat closer halves, untented to minimize vertical separation compared to the mouse) and might have an uncomfortably small mousepad to avoid doing this even more. Not a compromise I'd want to make.

This one is recursive-grid for Hammerspoon users on macOS, and is probably the easiest of the open source implementations to fully customize. (I made it years ago)

Hell - after installing, it shows a slider to help adjust the label size of each element - but I can't slide it because (surprise) Homerow doesn't support horizontal slider elements like this.

I also can't highlight text on the screen etc.

Struggling to find a usecase for Homerow that isn't just navigating chrome or my filesystem.

I was always in the camp that believed that the keyboard was always faster than mouse for complex workflows.

Then a couple of weeks ago I spent most of a day in a hospital emergency room with someone, and couldn't believe the way those E.R. nurses fly through the menus and options in Epic using just a mouse.

I'm now closer to believing that "muscle memory is muscle memory." But I suspect it only works if the windows appear in the exact same place all the time.

"Manipulate macOS masterfully, minus the mouse."

I've been looking for something like this

Also, I'm not sure the dynamic nature of the hotkeys is a good thing. I could imagine if you use Mouseless for a long period of time, muscle memory might prevail as screen locations map to the same set of keys.

Because they are ugly, just like ThinkPads that include them.