Making a case for using shortcuts
A productivity boosting list
This post documents what I usually tell those people that are unlucky enough to draw my attention to their lack of using shortcuts. If you use your mouse more than your keyboard you might benefit from reading this post.
Four years ago, I was sitting in Lathrop Library at Stanford doing a problem set for one of my computer science classes, when it happened. Mid-conversation one of my friends paused, switched from his code editor to his browser, googled the question we were just discussing and switched back to his code editor. His action caught me off guard. Not because it is unusual to switch between Google and your code editor (as any software engineer will tell you, the opposite is true: it would be unusual not to do this), but because he did it so fast. At the time my usual workflow to switch between between coding and googling would be: do the four-fingers-up motion on my trackpad to see all my apps, point and click to select the browser, click on the search bar of the browser, google, do the four-fingers-up plus point-and-click to get back to my code editor. Ludwig (my buddy) had just done CMD+tab, CMD+L, google, CMD+tab to do the same.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation
If you are wondering why I am obsessing about a simple shortcut to switch between two apps, here is a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. My guesstimate is that back then as today I spend an average of around 8 to 10 hours on any given workday using my laptop. Ludwig probably did the switch to the browser and back around five seconds faster than I did at the time. Let’s say I switch between apps around once every ten minutes (a conservative assumption), that’s a solid five minutes I will be saving every day. Over a year with 250 working days, that’s around 20 hours or, put differently, around two full working days. Two full working days that I used to spend switching between apps. Two full working days that I can now use to do more exciting things (like writing a blog post telling other people to use CMD+tab).
It does not stop with CMD+tab
Turns out there are plenty of other shortcuts and apps that can save you time in the tiny workflows you repeat thousands of times every year.
To give you a preview: here is an example of how to send an email with a link to a YouTube video without your hands leaving the keyboard (except for pressing the ‘Send’ button at the end — something I don’t like to do via shortcut, so I don’t end up sending half-written mails by accident).
But before we turn to my arsenal of shortcuts, let me tell you about the simple productivity rule that governs them all.
Don’t let your hands leave the keyboard
Don’t let your hands leave the keyboard. It’s as simple as that. Every time you take your hands off your keyboard to use a mouse or the trackpad you lose precious seconds, that (as we have seen) will add up over a lifetime of staring at your screen. Once you get into the habit of speeding up your most repetitive workflows with simple shortcuts, a question you will learn to love is a variation on the above rule: How can I do this without my hands leaving the keyboard?
Set up your Mac like Timon
After talking to Ludwig, I felt very sheepish. Here I was, studying artificial intelligence and I did not even know how to quickly switch between two apps.
A few years later, with a lot of help and inspiration from more productive friends, I now have a small collection of apps and shortcuts I use every day to speed up the workflows on my Mac. I will list the ones I use the most below. If just one of them helps you speed up the way you navigate your computer I will be a happy man. But after all is said and done it does not matter if you end up using the same tools and shortcuts as I do. What does matter is that you don’t spend two days a year switching between your apps.
Here we go.
Raycast
If you don’t already, use Raycast. It’s the cool version of Spotlight. Use CMD+space (⌘+space) to open new apps, search the web, search for files and automate anything you can imagine. There are plenty of extensions in their store that you can choose from to make your life even easier. My most used ones are:
- Google Maps Search (by Raphael Ruban)
- Emoji Search (built-in)
Switching Between Apps
I highly recommend hiding your dock from view (in System Preferences > Dock select Automatically hide and show the Dock) and navigating between apps with CMD+tab (⌘+tab) instead of the four-fingers-up motion on your trackpad.
Switching Between Tabs
Two of my most used shortcuts are the ones for switching between neighboring tabs. Since I am used to using Vim (a text editor that is based around the belief that most people spend more time editing existing text rather than writing new text) and since it very nicely adheres to the “keep your hands on the keyboard and move your fingers as little as possible” I use
- CMD+j (⌘+j) for ‘Select Previous Tab’
- CMD+k (⌘+k) for ‘Select Next Tab’
This works for all applications that have menu items called ‘Select Previous Tab’ and ‘Select Next Tab’ (such as Chrome, iTerm and PyCharm) and can be configured under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.
Switching Between Windows
Sometimes you need to switch between different PDFs in Preview or multiple windows in Chrome. To do this the default shortcut is CMD+` (⌘+`). I have remapped it to CMD+caps lock (⌘+⇪), since caps lock is right next to tab (to switch applications) and much easier to reach. To do this go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard and set the shortcut for Move focus to next window. If you remap caps lock ⇪ to escape ⎋ (see below), make sure you set the shortcut to CMD+escape (⌘+⎋).
General Shortcuts
It is unlikely that these will be new to you, but for completion’s sake here they are anyways.
- CMD+q (⌘+q) — to quit an application
- CMD+n (⌘+n) — to open a new “thing“ (for Mail this might be a new mail, for Chrome this is a new window)
- CMD+c (⌘+c) —copy
- CMD+x (⌘+x) — cut
- CMD+v (⌘+v) — paste
- CMD+shift+v (⌘+shift+v) — paste with the format matching
Browser — Shortcuts
- CMD+t (⌘+t) — open new tab
- CMD+shift+t (⌘+shift+t) — open most recently closed tab
- CMD+l (⌘+l) — focus cursor on search bar
- CMD+w (⌘+w) — close tab
Browser— Vimium plugin
Vimium let’s you navigate Chrome with Vim-like key bindings.
- f — to highlight all links with a letter combination you can type to press the link
- j — to scroll down
- k — to scroll up
Window management–Raycast extension
Raycast’s window management, lets you easily resize windows on your Mac. This makes it easy to put two apps side-by-side or to resize one application back to full-screen. I use the “Spectacle” presets, that can be set in the extension settings.
- option+CMD+arrow key (option+⌘+arrow key) — resize to the left/right/top/bottom
- option+CMD+f (option+⌘+f) — resize to full-screen
1Password
1Password for managing passwords. It comes with a plugin for all major browsers and one powerful shortcut:
- Cmd+\ (⌘+\) — auto-fills the sign-in form of a website
Rambox
Rambox lets you access your favorite messaging channels (WhatsApp, Messenger, LinkedIn + multiple Slack Channels) in one place. It is not a shortcut but can you help you get a handle on the mess caused by the plethora of messaging apps in use these days.
Here are three more tips that are most likely only relevant if you code.
Replacing Caps Lock ⇪ with Escape ⎋
This really useful if you are using Vim (to switch between Insert and Command mode), but even if you don’t use Vim, be honest with yourself: when do you ever use Caps Lock? To do this open System Preferences > Keyboard, press “Modifier Keys…” and select ‘⎋ Escape’ for ‘Caps Lock (⇪) Key’. After you have done this you can now reach the Escape-key without the fingers of your left hand having to leave their “asdf”-position.
PyCharm with Vim key bindings
Modern IDEs come with an insane amount of (useful) shortcuts and if you have ever pair programmed with someone that knows how to use them you might start to believe in magic again. The benefits of knowing how to use the shortcuts of the text editor you use to write your code will make the benefits of using CMD+tab look like peanuts. I write a lot of Python, so I use PyCharm with Vim key bindings (thanks to the IdeaVim plugin). Listing the coolest PyCharm shortcuts probably deserves its own blog post, so I won’t do that here.
Terminal — fzf
fzf gives fuzzy super powers to your command-line reverse search (shortcut: Ctrl+r). I could not imagine using my terminal without it. As I ambush even more people about upgrading their terminal-game than I do about their shortcut-game, I documented my terminal setup here.
Thanks to Ludwig Schubert for that fateful day in Lathrop Library. Thanks to Vincent Sitzmann for showing me Vimium. Thanks to Bonnie Chow for enlightening my use of PyCharm. Thanks to Sebastian Schaal for giving me the hint to switch windows via caps lock. And thanks to Magnus Jahnen for pointing out that Spectacle is deprecated and showing me Rectangle. :)
If you have another shortcut or tool that changed the way you use your computer, I would love to hear about it!
Change log
- August 5th, 2022. Replaced Franz with Rambox. Replaced Alfred with Raycast. Replaced Rectangle with Window Management (a Raycast extension).
