What I Use: Keyboard Shortcuts

It should not come as huge surprise I'm addicted to keyboard shortcuts, given my love of TextMate* and my fully-loaded 17'' MacBook Pro. Together we take on the world. Keyboard shortcuts let me fly through the busy work and allow me to focus on creating great stuff. You can find THE list of mac keyboard shortcuts here and a good textmate keyboard shortcut cheat sheet here.

Those are just the raw tools. Most people try to start by memorizing the first one that catches their eye. They try to remember, by sheer force of will, it and hope to recall it during their usual workflow. It could sit unused in their "psyche buffer" for 1 second or 1 day. That is the hard and inefficient path towards becoming a knowledge worker ninja. Additionally, it is easy to become overwhelmed with almost never ending list of keyboard shortcuts.

I have an experimental cognitive psychology twist on learning keyboard shortcuts.

It is the "glue game." Every time you sit down at your computer, your hands are "glued" to the keyboard. You lose the current round in the game when you touch the mouse (the trackpad counts, too). Your score is how much work you can do without touching the mouse. After you lose the current round by touching the mouse, you look up the specific keyboard shortcut for that action. You back up a couple of actions steps and use the shortcut. The next round of the game starts after you get up and sit back down. Each round should last a little longer and you should learn a single specific meaningful shortcut.

It is the easiest and quickest way to learn the actual keyboard shortcuts you use. It is called chaining in the business.

One of my favorite chains is:

⌘tab, repeat until textmate is selected

⌘N

⌘S

Five tabs

Up and down arrows into Dropbox

Return

That chain puts me in textmate, opens a new file, and saves to it to my dropbox folder, which lives in my sidebar. I can capture and, more importantly, never lose every idea, brilliant or not, I have. I started by learning ⌘tab link and then I added the ⌘N link. I added one link at a time until I created that complete chain.

Leave a comment with your single favorite keyboard shortcut chain.

*Do not comment or ask me about textmate 2!