See especially the “wdired-change-to-wdired-mode” command – it’s magical.
Good luck with your keyboard-controlled desktop. I try to use mouse as little as possible too, so I've been using awesome [3] for a long time now and really enjoy its keyboard-friendly approach. My main usage of the mouse (actually, a trackball) comes from web browsing. I've tried uzbl [4], but it didn't feel right to me.
[3]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/
[4]: http://www.uzbl.org/
I use Firefox to browse. Admittedly there's still a lot of the web which requires a mouse, including webapps I need for work. I have tried Vimperator and Pentadactyl extensions, but didn't really like them. Firefox has some keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn to switch tabs, and ' to search for link text and Enter to follow it.
The "It's All Text" extension allows you to dump text fields into the text editor of your choice.
I use Gmail for mail, it has good keyboard shortcuts. I've tried mutt but couldn't find a config I liked. I use Vim to text edit, Vimcasts.org was fantastic for improving past "i" and ":wq". I use Weechat for IRC which has good default keybindings and lets you make more, it also has fantastic plugins.
My work is largely in webapps (which require mouse), IRC, and commandline. Managing files in the commandline is tedious. The file manager is one of the last major mouse-driven things I have in my workflow.
I use MC occasionally when copying or moving large numbers of files around where repeated `mv` commands would be tedious.
It's a good tool to have around even if you don't need it often. On OS X you can run `brew install mc`.
