6.

Use Shortcuts
Learning keyboard shortcuts is a classic trade-off between time now and time
later. Learning new shortcuts is slow - the immediate cost feels like it ranges
from seconds to minutes. Once you know the shortcuts, they do make
you faster - it takes around 1.6s to activate a keyboard shortcut compared to
2.2s to click an icon and 3s to click through a menu. Moving your hand
between the keyboard and mouse wastes 0.4s. As one becomes more
proficient, this should become more of an issue - professional gamers report
that cursor movements are much slower than keypresses. Moreover,
keypresses can more easily be parallelized with each other and with mouse
commands. The proficient user will minimize mouse travel ingeneral, but
most straightforwardly, they will offload actions to the keyboard.
Here are my keyboard shortcuts for PC (there will be Mac equivalents):
Word-processing shortcuts
o Ctrl-S, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-A
Text cursor movement:
o Home, End, Ctrl-Left, Ctrl-Right, Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down
o Ctrl-shift-right, Ctrl-shift-left, Ctrl-delete, Ctrl-backspace and so on for
selection and deletion
More Google Chrome shortcuts
o Ctrl-T to open a new tab, Ctrl-W to close the active tab, Ctrl-Tab to move one
tab to the right, Ctrl-Shift-Tab to move one tab to the left
o Middle click to open a tab in a new window or close a tab
o Ctrl-F for Find
o Space to scroll down and Shift-Space to scroll up
o Tab, Shift-Tab to jump between input boxes in a form
Omnibox use in Google Chrome:
o F6 or Alt-D to open the Omnibox. Type then Enter for a Google Search or
Alt-Enter to open the search in a new tab
o Using Manage Search Engines, one can install highly useful shortcuts: D
then Space to use the Omnibar to search "I'm feeling lucky" - I never used I'm
feeling lucky previously, but I have now found this increasingly useful. S
then space to open a Google Scholar search
o Using "define X" for a dictionary. Using "D define X Alt-Enter Ctrl-W" to
look up a dictionary from the Omnibar in a new tab, and then close it again.
o With the I'm feeling lucky shortcut, "d synonym X" works for a thesaurus. "d
wiki X" generally brings up a wikipedia article, and so on...
Other:
o Ctrl-1 to open the first application from the taskbar, Windows Explorer
o Ctrl-2 to open the second application from the taskbar - Google Chrome
o Alt-tab to move between applications
It is tempting to learn multi-step menu shortcuts using Alt but these aremuch
slower. Mine are more idiosyncratic and I get less value out of them: Alt-T-
W to spell-check, and Alt-Space-N to minimise. I have also recently
installed KeyRocket, a Chrome extension that teaches you Gmail shortcuts,
and will report back on its usefulness. These are the best tips I've learnt so far
for rapidly communicating with your computer.