The Magic of Keys

Deepshi Garg
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Cursor vs keymaps is the biggest struggle for novice programmers. Comfort lies in the cursor, but experienced individuals preach keys. Is it worthy to take the pain, pull the fingers out of the cushion and push them to the keyboard? I explored it. Read on!

Bootcamp Day13

Well, I was not in the pink of my health, and thus missed the sessions of Bootcamp Day12. Come Bootcamp Day13, I paired with Divya, my first pairing with a known person, a person from my college. Also, my first pair up with an experienced non-Gojek person, someone who is not a fresher, and not from Go-Jek. This made a major contribution in my learning from the day.

She could do magic in the IDE and at the same time, teach me the tricks. She is a wonderful person to work with. Following the ping pong section of the drills, I still did my part using cursor and menus though. My fingers did not wish to leave their comfort zone. Divya taught me things, I learnt, but could not implement. I tried to follow the keys, but the fingers found content in scrolling the menus. This is tough, and the shift requires rigorous determination, at least to start with.

We had to cope with the pace of the team, and thus, I couldn’t afford to experiment my affluence. But I had to, I cannot match my fingers with my brain until I switch to the keys!!

Bootcamp Day14

Pairing up with Bima, an experienced Dev-Ops team member from Go-Jek Indonesia. An awesome person again. Pairing up with experienced individuals is always an ecstatic roller coaster ride for the brain. Bima knows the magic of IntelliJ IDEA CE in and out. He is a man of keys. He can write the whole project, build it and run it without lifting fingers from the keyboard. And simultaneously, he can teach, or better, he forces you to do your part of the drill with the same magic tricks. He was the first person who forced my fingers to leave their blanket and press the keys! He readily dropped the pace at the cost of me bringing up some keyboard shortcuts into my second nature of coding practice.

Yeah, I was pretty slow in the beginning, but man, you gotta trust me over this, KEYS SPEED YOU UP. Probably, key maps are one of the secrets of fast and efficient programmers. They help you sync your fingers with your mind. They help you type and code and switch menus with the speed your mind thinks. Yes, the cursor menus are easy and approachable, but you can know the difference only when you are familiar with keymaps.

Spend at least a day with the keys, and you will know the true speed of your thinking. GUI should not be the one to limit your productivity. Learn at least two to three keymaps everyday, and more importantly, bring them to practice. Trust me, they work wonders!

Deepshi Garg

Written by

Trying to be technical in the simplest manner!

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