Keyboard shortcuts
Accelerate your productive and
unproductive activities
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What’s wrong with the mouse?
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Hand on
mouse?
See the
pointer?
See the
target?
Move hand on
mouse
Move the mouse
until eyes catch
the movement
Scan the screen
for clues...
Move sharply
toward target
Slow down near
target
Click Victory
Press shortcut
Remember
shortcut?
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Especially bad when
- The target to click is far away
- The target to click is very small
- The UI of app X has changed
- It’s not your mouse or PC
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What’s wrong with the mouse?
- Slow
- Find pointer, find target, move pointer, click
- Complex
- Requires high-precision operations and focus
- Not the keyboard
- Hands are on the keyboard most of the time
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Gmail
- Arrows
- j k -> previous, next conversation
- p n -> previous, next message in a conversation
- g i -> go to inbox
- g s -> go to starred messages
- * u -> select unread messages
- Shift i -> mark selected messages read
Browser tabs -> Alt num
- Alt 1: switch to tab 1
- Alt 2: switch to tab 2
- ...
- Alt 9: switch to last tab (regardless of its number)
(Chrome, Firefox, sadly not Safari)
(On OSX, it’s Apple num instead of Alt)
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Shell
- Control r: find and run command in history
- Control c: cancel the current line, start fresh
- Control w: delete word backward
- Control y: “yank” (paste “clipboard”)
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How to remember them
- Associate with action verbs and object nouns
- Similar patterns everywhere
- Force yourself to use them
- Create a cheatsheets repo on GitHub
(example: https://github.com/janosgyerik/cheatsheets)