Introduction

I believe that typing proficiency is important for a software engineer. It is easier to stay in flow if you can type fast and navigate around your IDE and tools with shortcuts. In fact, I love that a part of our job has to do with manual skills. Improving these physical skills is a nice change from learning new technologies and tools.

A good start for getting better at something is to find out where you stand. At first, I wanted to get an overview of how many shortcuts I know and use. So, last year, I created a database of my shortcuts in Notion. I already described this in my post on personal knowledge management. In the process, I found some inconsistencies and tried to use the same key combination in as many applications as possible.

Since then, I have thought a lot more about this whole thing. I should probably not tell you that I had a few dreams where keyboard shortcuts played a prominent role. Anyway, I spent much of my social distancing free time on my first published solo project: KeyCombiner. It has made creating and maintaining my shortcut database much simpler.

The tables in this post are generated by using KeyCombiner’s CSV export and converting it to Markdown with this handy web tool. The collection is split by context. By context, I mean the application or type of applications in which the shortcut can be used.

Essential

The context of these shortcuts is not further defined because I expect them to work anywhere. As the name suggests, I think these shortcuts are so ubiquitous that everyone should know them.

Editor

The next set of shortcuts is applicable in any kind of editing software. Except the first one (Replace), these work in pretty much all text fields independent of application.

IDE

As a software engineer, this context is very important for me. In my experience, many complex IDE features, especially those related to refactoring, are not used at all if one does not know the shortcut. So in this case, knowing additional shortcuts does not only make you faster, it gives access to additional features.

Those features can sometimes even have an impact on code quality. For example, if you know a shortcut to extract a selected code block into a method, you might be less prone to writing large blocks of code that are hard to read. Knowing the common debugging shortcuts can make you more comfortable with the process and less inclined to use print statements.

Currently, I use VSCode, PyCharm, and Eclipse as IDEs for different languages and project sizes. I have configured the listed shortcuts to work in all of them, except for some that I only use in PyCharm.

OS

The shortcuts in this section are among my most used ones. For anyone of these, I can say with certainty that I use it many times a day.

You might notice the Media shortcuts with keys, such as num2. I repurposed my Numpad for this because I don’t use it for typing numbers. Reassigning keys works especially well with my keyboard with blank keycaps The labeling can never be wrong because there is none ;)

The first entry in this context’s table represents 9 separate shortcuts. Switching between applications via super + 1-9 has been a noticeable productivity boost for me. I rarely have to start an application by other means now.

Chrome

Many of the shortcuts that I use most frequently while browsing the internet are already covered in the sections above. However, there are some keyboard combinations unique to web browsing.

Web Apps

Until recently, I didn’t use a lot of web application keyboard shortcuts. I feel like the applications are partly to blame for this. Why is it not common to show keyboard shortcuts in button tooltips? Or even in a small notification when a user does an action via mouse? Anyway, working on KeyCombiner motivated me to expand my shortcut knowledge in this area.

I have some learning ahead of me, but I am not quite comfortable with my most used apps. Knowing web application shortcuts is quite rewarding because the respective action would often take multiple mouse clicks. Sometimes it is even hard to find the right button for it, if you don’t know an action’s shortcut.

Conclusion

It is probably not a good idea to copy my collection, but seeing what kind of shortcuts are used by another software engineer might give you some ideas. Maybe I could even inspire you to create a similar list of your own shortcuts. If so, you might want to try out KeyCombiner, as I am sure it’s the most efficient way of accomplishing this.

Am I missing some important shortcuts? I would be very interested to hear your suggestions.