Comment 102 for bug 48671

exitance says it pretty well.

And I'll add my recent observation that it doesn't make sense that "You're going for the keyboard anyway, hitting F2 isn't interruptive," because 90% of the time when I'm renaming a file I'm not totally renaming it. Instead I'm editing it, keeping most of the text. Meaning once the filename is in edit mode I click to specify where I'm adding text or which word(s) I'm replacing.

So instead the workflow looks like this: Mouse to select file, Keyboard to F2 into rename mode, Mouse to select cursor position in filename, Keyboard to type change in filename.

If I could rename with a second click, there would be one modal switch instead of three.

Oh, and right-click, then find and select Rename from the context menu isn't much better. Now we're talking finding and targeting additional screen elements, a whole other story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law