Why separate Actions from Intents?

You might wonder: why not just map a key combination directly to an action?  Why
have intents at all? This is because it is useful to have a separation of
concerns between where the key mapping definitions are (often at a high level),
and where the action definitions are (often at a low level), and because it is
important to be able to have a single key combination map to an intended
operation in an app, and have it adapt automatically to whichever action
fulfills that intended operation for the focused context.