Seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit in the announcement is a fun coincidence. He founded gmail. One of the things he did with gmail is gave it a command-line user interface.

I recently found out that a lot of people I would expect to know about it, don't. If that includes you, go to the gear on the upper right of your gmail, select that, then Settings, then turn keyboard shortcuts on and save.

Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [ ] is so much faster than a mouse. I don't even think before using / to search. :-)