I have never used GIS software but used to do circuit design with cad software. My favorite by a hugue margin was Viewlogic. It had (has ?) a gui which allowed you to select and move components about, but that worked closely coupled with keyboard commands - net to add a wire, bus to add a group of wires, a component name to place a named object from the library (IC, resistor etc).
The use of a command window with a mouse based gui was very expressive and though there where optional pull down windows I never needed nor wanted them. -Steve
