Darkslide

I've been thinking about this for a while. I do a lot of batch editing — shooting events, portraits, sometimes hundreds of shots in a session — and the constant mouse-to-slider, slider-to-mouse loop just feels like it slows me down mentally. Not the processing, just the switching. It got me wondering how many photographers actually care about this, so I started building something: a photo editor where you literally never have to touch the mouse. Navigation, adjustments, copy-pasting edits across batches, export — all keyboard. Inspired by how Vim works, if that means anything to you.

The main idea is: j/k to move between sliders, h/l to adjust values (arrows supported as well), y to yank all adjustments from one photo and p to paste across a selection. There's also a full tone curve editor that's entirely keyboard-driven.

I'm curious whether this kind of workflow would appeal to anyone other than me, or if the mouse just feels natural enough that removing it would be more annoying than helpful.

A few questions I'd love your take on:

• Do you ever feel like the mouse breaks your flow when editing large batches?

• Would a Vim-style keyboard workflow feel intuitive, or would it have too steep a learning curve?

• What editing tasks feel most tedious to you right now?

  If you want to poke around and see what I mean, I've got a free web version up at https://darkslide.app — no install, runs entirely in the browser. Happy to hear any feedback, including "this is a terrible idea and here's why."