> I hate context switching. I want my input sequences to always work, no matter what software I'm using.
Context switching is a skill, and an increasingly important one. To use the example of this essay, I certainly don't expect to have the same response to my input if I'm using PyCharm full-tilt as I do with an HTML <textarea>, and I expect both of these to be different from a coloring book I'm sharing with my child.
The differences in these interfaces are highly valuable, and the cost of enjoying each of them is relatively small in that it requires the maintenance of the mental (and sometimes physical) skill of context switching.
To apply a bit of reductio ad absurdum: if this were globally and successfully applied through the realms of technology, even unto genetic and geological engineering, we'd expect a car, a lover, a mountainside, and an HTML <textarea> to share the same context and afford for the same muscle memory.
(If this sounds like too far a reach for a comparison, please pause and ponder for a moment just how _diverse_ text input has become in your life, across all of your devices and apps, with all of your relations both human and computer. Now consider that this diversity is likely to grow in ways that are difficult to imagine in the years to come.)
Even if this is somehow abstractly possible (and obviously we can't even imagine what it looks like from here), is it desirable? Is there something so important about avoiding context-switching that we'd be willing to forego the diversity of joy that arises from interacting with the elements of life differently?
Of course I assert that the answer is 'no', but I think that it's obvious even in the realm of text editors. I love having copilot in my IDE, but there's no way I'd want it in a <textarea> subject to the whims of javascript I might have forgotten to disable. Similarly, I'm happy to have a web application respond in reasonable ways to keystroke events that I enter in a text area, but I don't want that for my CLI. Etc, etc.
tl;dr: Context switching is a skill that requires work, but it's worth the richness it empowers.
P.S. I actually like quote-completion. ;-)