Kurt;
For the most part it comes down to not having to use the mouse. I can edit in Vim and use ChucK shell and play for hours without touching the mouse. I am also used to vim commands and can edit much faster with them which makes a Huge difference in live coding.
The odd thing is that the Linux version of the mini does need the mouse. You can't ctrl+tab from buffer to buffer and selecting or creating a new buffer doesn't automatically move keyboard focus to it. On Windows these things do work. If it weren't for those things I don't think I'd need to use the mouse with it; I don't think i do under Windows.
Oh well. I'm just going to stick with the command line version and hope someone realizes that the shell is where it is at. If the capability to really live code in the shell (navigating namespaces and stuff beyond just adding/removing shreds etc.) grew, it would be incredible (fingers crossed).
Yes, indeed, but of course that involves more than just the interface. I heard gossip that that might be hard to add to ChucK, or at least harder than previously imagined. Kas.