Develop an Automator’s Mindset - Take Control of Automating Your Mac (1.0) - page 8

or even usually faster than using a pointing device. (For a fascinating glimpse into research
Apple did in this area in the late 1980s, read Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini's articles “Keyboard vs.
The Mouse,” part 1 , part 2 , and part 3 .) And let's not forget the mental effort required to learn
and recall all those shortcuts!
Keyboard shortcuts are likely to be superior in certain situations:
• Cases where you've memorized a keyboard shortcut so fully that its application
is a matter of muscle memory—as is often the case with the most common
shortcuts such as Command-C for Copy, Command-X for Cut, Command-V for
Paste, Command-S for Save, Command-W for Close, and Command-Q for Quit
• Editing operations in which you can perform a keyboard shortcut with one
hand while selecting text or other elements using your mouse or other pointing
device with the other hand
• Activities that require multiple mouse clicks (refer back to Click Less )
• Activities that require navigating submenus or searching for a menu command
whose location is unknown
• Repetitiveactivities(forexample,applyingacertainmenucommandtoadozen
different objects, one after the other)
• Actions to which you can assign a mnemonic, multi-key shortcut sequence,
such as Command-P-D-F for Save as PDF (see Use Multi-Key Shortcuts in
Microsoft Word and Use Multi-Key Shortcuts in Nisus Writer Pro )
Furthermore, if you are a touch-typist and your work involves mostly typing (in which case
there's a frequent time penalty for moving one hand from the keyboard to the pointing
device and back), you're likely to see greater efficiency improvements from using keyboard
shortcuts than if you're a hunt-and-peck typist or if your work involves more mousing than
typing.
Write it down: Make a note of tasks you perform several times a day that require searching
for menu commands, as well as those you repeat two or more times in a row.
What to do: In some cases, you can learn their existing shortcuts (see Use OS X's Built-in
Keyboard Shortcuts ) , but if they don't have shortcuts—or you don't like the built-in
shortcuts—you can assign keyboard shortcuts to them (see Create Your Own OS X Keyboard
Shortcuts and Use a Macro Utility ).