J, J, J, K, U, J, J, U
If you spend a lot of time on a computer, keyboard shortcuts have probably become intuitive. The “shift + end” to select complete lines. The “alt + f + s” to quickly save your progess. And more commonly, the “ctrl + x” and “ctrl + v” to cut and paste. These are common among desktop applications; but now that some web applications are mocking desktop applications, keyboard shortcuts have found a spot there as well. When used for true benefit, I think keyboard shortcuts add a lot to an application. Take Google Reader for instance. There is a lot (for me) of content coming and going, and it’s tedious to use the mouse repeatedly. Luckily, they have an exhaustive mix of easy-to-use shortcuts. Especially useful: the j/k combination, with a touch of u. Use j/k to navigate next/previous, and u to expand to full-screen (good for the longer posts). There are many more if you’re interested. With something like a feed reader, I think it’s important to be able to get through feed’s quickly; these shortcuts definitely help. I think Rails has an easy way to incorporate keyboard shortcuts into an application, but I’m not positive on that.
Luke Tuesday, 05 Dec, 2006 Posted at 11:14AM
Wow thats a great helpful site actually. Thanks a lot mate.
Abhijit Nadgouda Saturday, 09 Dec, 2006 Posted at 02:18AM
What I liked about the shortcuts was that many of them were common with vim. I am a vim fan, there is some learning curve, but it speeds you up a lot because you can do everything faster with the keyboard than with the mouse. The same goes for other tools.