Increase productivity with keyboard shortcuts

I am sure you always might have heard to avoid shortcuts in life, but in a developer life it is the other way around. Let’s see what shortcuts I am talking about.

Yes, you guessed it right, I am talking about the Keyboard shortcuts. This blog is for the one’s who want to get started with keyboard shortcuts and increase their productivity.

What are Keyboard shortcuts?

Performing an action with a keyboard command is what I am referring to as Keyboard shortcut.

E.g: In chrome to open a new tab we could use cmd+t

Why Keyboard shortcuts?

Why should we care about Keyboard shortcuts, when we can do everything with the mouse? Agreed, we can do everything with mouse, however we can do the same actions with Keyboard as well. This is in turn much faster.

Using keyboard shortcuts while programming or working will increase the speed at which we do things. Thus increase the productivity.

Where all to use shortcuts?

In Terminal, IDE’s, Chrome or pretty much in any application there are shortcuts. Even, OS has shortcuts on how to open application, kill application. This list goes on.

Some of my most used shortcuts:

IntelliJ IDE and Terminal are some of the most used applications for my work.

Here are my favourite and the most used shortcuts in them:

In IntelliJ: cmd+shift+A -> Universal shortcut, where I can give the action I want to perform.

Since, we can search the action. This would be very helpful when we don’t remember a shortcut for an action we want to perform.

In Terminal: ctrl+R -> Reverse search the terminal history

This comes very handy to search for a command we executed sometime back. Without this, I used to either copy the command or search it endlessly with the up arrow.

How to learn shortcuts?

For most of the applications, IDE’s we work with, there are keyboard cheat sheets available. It’s just one search away. Get the cheatsheet and start using those shortcuts.

Here are some of the cheatsheets:

In my opinion, learning shortcuts is one way of sharpening tools. Initially you might feel, you are putting a lot of effort in learning the shortcuts and using them. But, trust me it will pay off in the future.

Please do comment your favourite productivity hacks as well :)

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