To drive parallels with programming - once you develop muscle memory you can become very efficient at coding. Thinking required only at the time of learning. Yes, learning Vim/Emacs is hard. But you have to go through that process only once. And after that typing/navigation becomes such an unconscious activity.

And if you choose simple and less obtuse language stacks, e.g. Clojure(script) - that will allow you to stop thinking about "mechanics" and concentrate your focus on solving the problem (instead of fighting the ecosystem, dependency management, language idioms, style guide, etc.).