Let's go farther back. I did/do code editing, not WYSIWYG word processing, and a good DOS editor let you do everything you needed without taking your hands off the keyboard. You could zoom through your code.
It,s true, when there is no pointer to speak of, you have no choice but to make it keyboard-accessible. I think accommodating DOS users is one of the reasons Windows started off so accessible to the keyboard. Compare that to Mac, which started off with a GUI and mouse, and to this day remains inaccessible to keyboard by default.
