10 years ago I built a custom piece of furniture for my home PC. Well, the basic flaw was that the mouse position was somehow uncomfortable. At the time I was using twm as a window manager, and took advantage of using different shortcuts to focus directly on each of the terminals I had opened (like F1 for the first terminal, F2 for the second, etc). That solved the mouse problem.
10 years after that, I still mostly ignore my mouse (although it's definitely more approachable) and speed-change between at least 4 terminals with the F keys... A lot of modern window managers have kept up support for shortcuts, but I'm sticking with WindowMaker, which has the additional perk of not bloating the system beyond redemption.
Some of my coworkers have got jealous of that, but discovered their own way: Konsole can open multiple virtual terminals, and you can hop directly on them using specific shortcuts.
Been Transferred Lately?