How did you learn keyboard shortcuts?

Question

What specific methods did you find for learning keyboard shortcuts during programming?

I do not mean that "look at them in the list." Rather, what methods do you use to create the automatic muscle memory that so many of us survived after some time?

Do you choose one key combination per day and practice it throughout the day? Are you focusing on learning all of them at the same time? Are you studying one application shortcut and then moving on to another? Do you have weird “games” that you play to remind you? Nothing? Something radical?

This is an interesting question for me, because my new (first) Mac is coming soon, and I wonder what methods I will use to quickly learn to avoid the mouse as much as possible in an environment in which I am completely alien.

Answer 1

When I started with the Mac, I used keycue to help. It is a summary of all the shortcuts for the current application.

For intellij, there is a plugin called "keypromoter" that will launch a shortcut on the screen for the action that you did on the mouse. If you use the mouse action too many times, it asks you if you want to assign a new shortcut to it.

Answer 2

One key function at a time (no pun intended).

I use boredom based learning. When I get bored of invoking one common function with the mouse, I quickly type in the keyboard. One at a time, without planning. Do it all, don't let the shortcuts focus on your task. They will come fast enough if you don’t care too much.

Answer 3

Find the reference card / wrapper that lists the most useful shortcuts, then print a copy and stick it on the side of the monitor.

After you have used the application well, getting used to most shortcuts, re-read the full documentation and find new things that for the first time did not seem very useful to you.

Answer 4

I try to study shortcuts, noting which functions I need most and marking a shortcut when I select a function with the mouse. Of course, this only works in applications that show a key combination along with the main menu item or tooltip button on the toolbar. (Fortunately, Eclipse does this.)

Answer 5

I used the cold turkey method with some success: just remove the mouse. Put it where you cannot reach, and try to get along.

Answer 6

Shortcuts are a matter of convenience, and I end up getting comfortable with them when I use them a lot.

In other words, I don’t use shortcuts that I will use once in a while, and shortcuts that I use all the time (copy, paste, block comment code, etc.) ultimately turn it into “I can do it blindly repertoire.

Nothing radical, no games, no practice - just use.

Answer 7

How to do it, how high-speed cubiners remember cube algorithms

• Read shortcut
• Practice this 20-30 times (first with a link to a list of shortcuts)
• Try to understand the reason for saving the shortcut depending on what it is (for example, ctrl + C for C , etc. This step will require mental processor time, but will set the shortcut in the nearest memory
• Review the same label at these intervals → 6 hours, 24 hours, 3 days, 1 w, and by then you will get it!

Some programs, such as Photoshop, have many shortcuts to actually learn them, but practice is the best option.

Answer 8

I will print an exhaustive list of labels and keep it on my desk. I select one or two important ones from this list, write them on a note and attach it to my monitor.

As soon as I succeed, I select another pair and repeat.

Answer 9

Personally, I don’t like keyboard shortcuts, they prevent me from moving between GUIs, and I really don’t find that they accelerate me so much - but I think that only because I think that your mileage are slower than I type may vary.

Most of my Coding time is spent trying to figure out how to remove excess amounts and simplify my design. I never recruit a method or leave it; most of them are rewritten several times until they are readable and fair debugged; therefore typing speed is not so important. When I do not pay for the time before I enter the code, I will later pay for it in refactors and errors.

Anyway, I figure out the keystroke when I do something enough, and I think I just need to find out what it is. After several years of using Eclipse, I know maybe 5 accelerators.

ctrl-shift-t (goto type) is probably the most convenient of all (well, after ctrl-space, which I don’t even consider as an accelerator, is just part of the input).

It’s useful to optimize the import (I think this is shift-alt-o), but 9 times out of 10 ctrl-space does it for you. This is good when you embed a lot of code.

Every so often I press ctrl-1 to open a “general fix”. I do this when I “fix” a lot of things at once.

ctrl-shift-L gives me a list of all the shortcuts if a new one appears.

This is pretty close to "this."

Answer 10

Programming pairs. Ideally, illegible pair programming.

There are thousands of teams in your IDE, and if you start learning all of them, it will take a lot of time and, ultimately, is not worth it. Important commands are those that you use (or should use) all the time, those that save you a lot of time. If you play with other programmers, each of them does something amazing - every time you expect to see many steps, and the change "just happens" - you shout: "Hey, how did you do that?" and your partner tells you. The shock and excitement of this experience will keep this trick in your head. This is the best way to find out.

The reason for the paradox is that each of us recognized different labels, different methods; the more people you touch, the more opportunities you have for the impact of big tricks.

This type of training is not intentional; this is natural and happens in parallel with actually doing your job.

Answer 11

I spend a lot of time editing people with shitty code: Ctrl-K + Ctrl-C = <3

Answer 12

to add to the answer a subtentant (since I don’t have enough mojo to actually comment there), if I find myself with the mouse, I do something repeating (my threshold is 3 times, i.e. the third time I notice , same task) I look at the keyboard shortcut and do it a couple of times, as a practice. The next time this happens, I will try to do it from my memory, and if I do not work, I will look again, but I will not find it. the latter scenario almost never happens unless I switch between mac, windoze or linux.