Unbind Keyboard Shortcuts

People tend to focus on learning more shortcuts, because the average person uses, maybe three?¹ That might already be too optimistic, but at absolute most the cap can't be more than about seven, because there's barely that many shared across all apps. Which is to say, most people would benefit from learning more.

But bad shortcuts are worse than no shortcuts, and unknown shortcuts are the worst of all.

This is why Vim² is scary for novices. They have a reasonable assumption that keys are primarily for typing. If the most basic action³ of text editing, typing, triggers a dozen unknown actions, that's scary and bad. Especially when some of them make your work disappear.

Does that mean you shouldn't learn Vim? No, if no one learned scary new things we wouldn't have gotten anything done. Vim is the extreme case.

I'm really talking about "normal" complex apps like video editors, drawing programs, IDEs. These are powerful programs used by power users.⁴ For the sake of discoverability and working out of the box, these apps require a legion of default shortcuts.

In most cases you should err on the side of keeping default shortcuts. Shortcuts don't clutter the UI and target muscle memory, so you can use what you need and ignore the rest.

The silly example is Window's Ctrl Alt Shift Win L to open LinkedIn. No one wanted this, and definitely not as a default. It's a marketing stunt, and one which offends me on principle. But it's basically untriggerable (5 keys, really?), so it's not even worth the effort to disable.⁵

But what about something you can accidentally trigger?

Accidental shortcuts triggers is a weirdly specific metric, but my best guess for a common example is Sticky Keys⁶ on Windows. Five Shift presses sounds difficult to do accidentally but I have done it before, whether from fidgeting or spamming the wrong key. Obnoxious noise, locks input till you close the popup, and it's universal.

I used an IDE for a while with a shortcut to run the selected code in the terminal. Great feature of interpreted languages, right? Test code immediately in the REPL, no boilerplate needed, everyone loves a fast iteration cycle.

But that isn't my workflow, so I was accidentally running almost arbitrary code in my terminal for no reason. It basically always errored out and wouldn't have done anything serious anyway, but still, really shouldn't be running arbitrary code snippets.

So I turned it off.

There's a couple shortcuts in my terminal for searching command history, which I don't use. I didn't bother turning most of them off, but one was one key off from a shortcut I actually use so I was typoing it all the time.

You can straight up disable shortcut typos, and it's built in to most apps. If only regular typos were so easy to deal with.

This applies to other things too. You aren't beholden to default settings and expected workflows.

I don't use emoji. I don't use default folders other than Downloads. These are good, reasonable defaults.

But I don't want them.

You can opt out of more than you think,⁷

- Rew

Nightly Notes

I suspect anyone who would even click on this already has a full suite of custom shortcuts in everything and/or uses Vim, so was there even a point in writing it? Still, I include myself in that group and it took me way too long to disable some of the worst offenders.

People say to write what you want to read. Let's be real, basically no one else is reading this. Schrodinger's internet, where everything is both eternal and ignored. I'm just rubber-ducking random things I know I should do more of but never had a reason to explain why.

I suppose that's good enough.

Holiday season is over, so it's back to the grind tomorrow.

Is this a grind as well? I don't know.

- Rew