Acme mouse chording is really cool, doing something similar with keyboard-oriented editors is much more tedious and often outright painful ( http://acme.cat-v.org/mouse ).

I suspect ken spends most of his time thinking rather than typing, and I have found this to be true of most great hackers.

Other famous Sam users include Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup(!) and Tom Duff. Kernighan writes at least as much English as code and I wonder how that affects his editor usage patterns, but I suspect that even when writing natural languages most time is best spent thinking (his writing style is very concise and clear, one could say similar to ken's code).

I think the obsession with saving keystrokes is very misguided, I still use editors like vi frequently, and having to think about what magic combination of commands to use to perform a task can be very distracting, is fun and feels good, like a tiny puzzle game built into your editor, but it doesn't help you write better code faster IMHO.

P.S.: Is interesting who has stuck with Sam and who moved to Acme (Dennis Ritchie switched to Acme, and most of the Go team Google besides ken use it too).

See also: http://sam.cat-v.org/