I am trying out new techniques/tools/equipment to increase my "general productivity" (roughly defined as how fast can I get stuff done). Some changes I have made is using Dvorak layout on a kinesis advantage keyboard, using Alfred, keeping apple magic trackpad on my keyboard. I found the latter two via HN comments. I wanted to reach out the HN readers for such tools/method that they use.
The first time a system is built will always take a significant amount of time. It's the ability to quickly and easily replicate the process that saves in the long run.
For example frameworks save on setup by providing a scaffold to build on. Package management systems (ex apt-get, npm, etc) save on the time required to build, update, manage dependencies. Provisioning (ex puppet, chef) save on setup and administration of full system builds. Containerization can be used to standardize development and production deployments.
If the processes can be scripted, versioned, and shared publicly via open source platforms and package registries then the initial setup can be reduced to nothing more than finding and gluing the right pieces together.
Windows is still years behind the curve on automation simply because the ecosystem still builds on the assumption that everything should be configurable via a GUI.
It's not so much, keyboard vs mouse as computer vs human. Automation will always produce the greatest gains in productivity and automation is best left to the command line.
Other *nix: dmenu[4], xcape[5]
[2] http://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
[3] http://manytricks.com/moom/
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-re... gives some more recent studies on the subject. I haven't read them, but it seems to me that keyboarding can be faster than mousing if you do it very, very, often.
And of course, the quality of mouse and keyboard matters a lot, too (early Windows mice were bad compared to Mac mice, mostly due to software (I have seen Windows mice were it was impossible to address every pixel on the screen, possibly due to staircasing/aliasing (what does one call that?) in the conversion between coordinate systems); this reminds me of http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Shut_Up.txt, which isn't really related, but may be an interesting read, anyways)