>>>I never found this a problem. In the days of yore under CP/M or DOS my NC was tree / folder anyway. The second windows is not farther away then a different folder in NC. Then there was the short editor and so on, but there is no need for that since 1995. If there is a real need to do file manipulation more tricky then the explorer exposes, my knife could even be VFP. (Normaly I use the bash that comes with git)
>>>Mouse is reliable since a can not remember, And even opening a second window is in most cases useless - one can drop / paste to the tree. I use this only if there are many things to move to a target. Normally creating a filter etc to do the job is more work then selecting - moving with the mouse. And rather useless, since most of that will be one time jobs.
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>>On my own machine mouse was never a problem, since 1988 (Atari) or 1991 (PC). It's that, in the last years of work, I often found myself in a situation where I'm sending updates or simply setting up a new customer, and that was done by remoting, always. Now it was not my job to establish the connection and set everything up from scratch, the preliminaries were usually dealt with by someone else... and I'd inherit the connection. This person would connect to the target server from a virtual machine on our common team server, and then I'd connect to the team server from home, connecting to the same VM at the same time (I've seen this become near impossible on new windows servers, VMs are single use). So this is remote three times - my RDP to the team server, then to the virtual machine, and then from that into their server. Often there was a fourth, rdp from their communication server to the app server. You can imagine how many times the resolution went lower, the mouse movement got erratic, even keyboard was unreliable (or azerty, even worse ;). Often it was faster to send a zip with TotalCommander (still below 2M) and run it there, then to try to get two Explorer windows aligned so that you can drag and drop files. In cases when more than two directories were involved, I'd spend a whole minute just trying to memorize which window was pointing where, because, eh, you don't see their locations until the window is topmost. And of course the default setup (new server, everything's at default, 80% defaults are wrong) you get about 15% of window space taken by the useless preview panel... So yes, it was a real problem for me. Files got sent to wrong folders, some files weren't selected (someone accidentally clicked without ctrl pressed) etc etc. TC was far more reliable, and it had real time estimate, not M$'s comedy.
>
>You sound bitter.

Nah, it's just that 33 years of bad history with M$ left some bland taste.

But actually at least half of this GUI paradigm was made up in the days when a demo with four ikons and ten files was enough to sell it.

Just like each gui builder app shows how to do a simple form but not a complicated document:items + 4 huge lookups. Or how any video demonstrating a new type of axe shows it used on plain straight pieces of wood, no knots.