I haven’t done really heavy programming in a few years and in the last week I was reminded how important typing is even in the age of visual applications. It is just faster to get around and worth the effort if you are doing it all the time. So some quick tips:
- Divvy. Yes I know it costs a bit of money, but this window organizer is incredibly valuable. The Mac version particularly so because they make it easy to add shortcuts. This let’s you never have to move windows around again. You memorize some shortcuts like Ctrl-Option-Command (that’s just the three buttons on the left) and the arrow keys move a window to the right, left). But the best is to create shortcuts like C-O-C 1, 2, 3 and 4 to throw into quandrants
- Vi. Yes it’s the worlds oldest and ugliest editor, but in terms of a small number of keystrokes, nothing seems better to me. For instance, to move up, you hit j you move down and k to move up. Also there are some amazing shortcuts like gw to use motion keys, so }gw means reformat the Words in the next paragraph.
- Slack. I use this alot, but never with the keystrokes. So learning how to just use the character mode.
Slack shortcuts
Slack have a large list of them. The most important is Command-/ which gives you the list, so the obvious ones. Unlike Vi, this is non modal so you get much more complex keystrokes. That’s one of the great things about vi:
- Command-N is a new message
- Command-Shift-A goes to all unread which is super unintuitive to me
- R is for read the message
- Escape marks as read all messages in current channel
- Command-1, 2, 3,… gets you to different slack groups
Superhuman shortcuts
I’m just learning how to use this thing (and also Gmail has similar shortcuts), but here are the great ones as collected by Nick Gray. Being model is awesome
- j to move down
- k to move up
- c to compose a new message
- r to reply to one person
- ENTER to reply all
- e to end an entire thread (they call it conversation)
- h to set a reminder if you don’t get a reply back
- CMD+k for help
- / for search
- z for undo
- x for select the whole thread
- CMD-U to unsubscribe
- g for go, gi to go to your inbox
One of the cool thing is the idea of a split or a group of messages. As Preet explains:
- To create a new split do a CMD-K split and then you get a new one. You can use booleans to create it, then you can configure the settings in Inbox Settings. I can’t seem to find a way just to drag some mail over and have it figure it out though.
- Snippets are boilerplate you get with CMD and a semicolon
