Why use shortcuts in the first place?  Let’s do a little test.  Open up word and type Just an Asterisk.  Now make me 3 copies of this text.  If your first impulse is to highlight with the mouse, then go to edit –> copy, move with the mouse and then go back to edit –> paste, then I can safely say that we are about to save you some serious time.  I think a reasonable guess for how long the above takes is about 1.5 seconds.  If you did this 10 times a day, for a 220 day work year (which I think we can agree is low), you’d waste 60 minutes per year.  Perhaps that doesn’t seem like a lot, but assuming you do it for 24 years, that’s a day of your life wasted entirely to copying and moving text.  On the other hand, if you hit Control + C then Control + V twice, you do exactly the same thing in about .5 seconds.  You’ve just made yourself 66.6666666% more efficient!

I admit head slapping, change your behavior for the better and name your children after me amazing.  It’s 2/3 of a day…  However, these little things add up, and you are simply wasting your time.

What you need to know

Are you using the Pentaverate of keyboard shortcuts?  (I’ve blatantly borrowed the term Pentaverate from “So I married an Axe Murderer”.  If you’re curious, I’ve copied the whole quote at the bottom of this post.) Here they are in all their glory:

If you’re using a Mac, just replace Control with the Apple key.  These shortcuts are used in nearly every piece of software since the creation of windows (or Mac OS, I don’t know which).  If your application works with images, text or any mixture of the two, these keys should be available for your use. 

Also, there’s a second level of shortcut that appear in most programs and are worth knowing (but that just don’t compare to the Pentaverate):

I would call these the dandies – their nice and dandy to know, but they do not work in every application (they are great for Microsoft Word).  You want to be careful with these, as in some applications they can be mapped to other functions.  One example, I recently was using Outlook and got myself in trouble.  In word, when you hit Control + Shift + S, it prompts you to save your file with a new name.  However, I was writing an email in Outlook and typed the same (Control + Shift + S), thinking that I would be able to save my draft for later use.  Instead, in Outlook those keys are mapped to Send!  My blank drafted email was sent out to everyone on the list, requiring a quick apology email to all…  The moral of the story:  Love the pentaverate, be wary of the dandies, but use them and remember that there are many more shortcuts out there. 

What you don’t need to know

There are many ways to hack the keyboard shortcuts on your machine.  First, you should take the time to learn them:

• The Windows Shortcuts
• The Mac Shortcuts

Once you’ve gotten an idea of what is available, you can start changing things or adding things in one of the following ways:

• You can find out which keys are already mapped before you create new ones via this application.
• You can map new keys to functions using Keyboard Tweaker.
• And if you’re feeling particularly bold, you can delve into AutoHotKey, a programming language designed to help create programs that run triggered by shortcuts.  These can range from very complex applications, to simple repetitive tasks…

That should be enough for now, but there’s plenty more to be done.  Enjoy speeding your life up with new shortcuts!

~ab

What you really don’t need to know

The so I married an Axe Murderer shout out (borrowed from IMBD Scripts but edited to keep it clean):

            STUART
Listen, Sonny Jim, it’s a known fact
there’s a society of the five
wealthiest people in the world, called
the Pentaverate, who run everything
and meet three times a year at a
secret country mansion in Colorado,
known as "The Meadows."

            CHARLIE
     (sarcastic)
And that’s obviously why we haven’t
heard about it in the newspapers.

            STUART
     (inappropriately angry
     & loud)
That’s right. They [*^&%] own the
papers, smartass. And everything
else. Why do you think Scotland’s
not been able to get independence?
Because the Queen the Pentaverate
and those English dome heads in West
Minster won’t have it.

            CHARLIE
Who are the other members of this
pentaverate?

            STUART
The Queen, the Rothchilds, the Gettys,
the Vatican, and Colonel Sanders
before he went tits up. Oh, I hated
the Colonel with his wee beady eyes.
And that smug look on his face.

            CHARLIE
Dad how can you hate "the Colonel?"

            STUART
Because the Colonel puts an addictive
chemical in it that makes you crave
it fortnightly.

What you need to know

Basically, there are two things that make up those icon shortcuts on your computer:

The link – Each shortcut has a simple link in it.  As you can see from my screenshot below, the URL connects my shortcut to my web link.This example is for a web link, but what is perhaps rather confusing about the situation is a link can also refer to a file.

If you’re running Windows XP, then you can easily add either type of shortcut by right clicking on your desktop and choosing new –> shortcut.

On a Mac, the process is about the same – right click or control click on your icon then choose make alias (that is the fancy pants Mac word for shortcut).

Once you add a new shortcut, you’ll be prompted to “type the location of the item”, as shown below.  This is the crucial step – if you type a web address, then your shortcut will be a web link.

However, if you type a file address, then your shortcut will be a  a file link.

For this process on a Mac, you’re going to need to do a bit of research.  Try this link first.

The Icon – The second part of the shortcut is the icon.  The Icon is pulled from one of two places (before you change it…).  If you’re linking to a program or folder, windows knows what kind of icon to use.  If you create a shortcut for website, the site’s icon will be used (if the site has bothered to put one in) otherwise, it will appear as a web document (again chosen by Windows).  Each of the statements above is entirely true for Macs too (just replace  the word Windows with Mac OS).

This should be enough to get you creating shortcuts on your home machine.  Remember that you can examine any icon on your desktop by right clicking and selecting properties (Get Info on a Mac).

What you don’t need to know

Icons can be changed to any .ico file that you find.  Here are some sites that might be fun:

• The Icon Archive
• Free Icons Web

If you’re using a windows machine and you’re envious of those Mac guys, you can create a Mac-like toolbar of icons using a program like object dock or rocket dock.

You can even create your own icons.

~ab