… will boost your productivity. I’m not kidding, it has been practically proven - keyboard shortcuts are several times faster than clicking fest.
On daily basis we use many complex tools with thousands of commands. Clearly, it’s not possible to learn the shortcut keystrokes for all of those, but Pareto law is right again - we use 20% of the functionality during 80% of worktime (I’d say that in most cases it’s more like 10-90 …). If we learn the shortcuts just for the most frequently used functions, it’ll help a lot. And it’s not that hard as many of the commands are shared between applications (“Create new …”, “Open …”, “Save …”, “Undo …”, “Compile …”, “Find …”, “Bookmark …”, “Go to …”, etc.).
Of course you can’t get rid of the mouse completely (otherwise, how would you reach the remaining 80%-90% of functionality?), but you’ll strongly limit its usage.
I’m mentioning all of that because I’ve found an interesting way to help you learning the shortcuts to popular applications - shortcutFoo! (https://www.shortcutfoo.com/)
It’s a nice, web-based application that can both teach you and examine your knowledge of keyboard short-cuts in several, popular applications like:
- Editors - Vim, Sumblime, Emacs, TextMate
- IDEs - Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm
- Other - Photoshop, Excel, Gmail, ReSharper
If you do a lot of coding, there’s no chance - you’ll notice the difference very, very soon.