Loading ...Shortcuts and hotkeys? Pfft, for the geeks and the interested only.
..or that’s what I thought while I was still working in Microsoft’s Windows. As far as I was concerned, simple and well-known hotkeys such as ctrl+c/v/s and shift for capitalization was all I needed. And it was true as well, for I was perfectly fine listening to the sound of a clicking mouse, and was never aware of what Windows had to offer — or there wasn’t much Windows offered that was of interest to me (somehow I think the latter, you can try to convince me otherwise). Making the crucial and hard choice of ditching Windows and embracing Mac OS X, made the use of shortcuts and hotkeys essential to my successive workflow, as well as natural.
Hide it, don’t minimize it!
The option to be able to hide applications with a beautifully executed cmd+h instead of stuffing the dock with minimized windows, is one of my favorites. How many times have you not been flushed and frustrated at having way too many minimized windows cluttering up the bar? Remember the time before the age of tabbed browsers? Simply clicking the red fat X in the upper corner of a window in a mac won’t quit the application like you’re used to either – which really got on my nerves the first week – it only closes the window; quitting requires a cmd+q. You can of course go to the application menu to quit it manually too, but why go to such lengths when you can just hit two keys..
Workspaces and smooth transitions
Neat features such as Spaces and Exposé which enables me to switch through up to 9 different work spaces (I usually have one for general business, one for design and art, one for webdesign and coding, and one for music and movies) and quickly view all windows at once in a smooth transition instead of tabbing through all the gazillions before finally hitting the one I’m lookin’ for, are also feattures I’ve fallen in love with and become addicted of. The screen capture keystrokes shift+cmd+3/4/4+spacebar are also features I love as I screencap a lot, and needed a break from the awkward way Windows deals with it by copying, pasting and then saving.
My brand of heroine? (aka: hotkeys are addictive)
All this is of course only a few keystrokes away, and getting “blod på tann” as we say it in Norwegian, only left me wanting more of the ease of using hotkeys. And because ‘everyone’ in the macworld uses hotkeys as if their lives depended on it, my brain’s been branded that it’s normal; it’s how it’s supposed to be – it’s how we roll. So now I use hotkeys as if my life depended on it as well; for the obvious things I previously mentioned, to the smaller things such as switching from bucket to brush in PS and going from bold to italic in word/pages.
Windows can probably do a lot of the same things as well with a few tweaks and plugins installed – but it all comes bundled in Mac OS X, and that’s where the ease comes in (and that’s how even the mundies are able to take part of it, not only the ‘elite’). Besides, whether or not a person decides to use hotkeys or not, is just a question of introduction and teasing. A mac just happens to be very good at the teasing part — and its followers at introducing.
Listening:
Reading:
Watching: Charmed S07E13
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