Less Mouse & More Keyboard

I’ve started to re-think my use of the mouse as an input device. The mouse is an inherently slow, unproductive tool for tasks that do not require precision. Yet, we use the mouse for these tasks because it is a habit left over from our computer beginner days. Think about it, the mouse only took a matter of 5 seconds to figure out. But since we are computer experts now, why do we use a mouse when using a keyboard shortcut could do the same thing quicker?

I always love when I find a keyboard shortcut alternative to mouse clicking. It means just a little less strain on my right wrist, which at the ripe old age of 24, is starting to feel a little bit of a tingle from the 10 years of mouse wear and tear. It also means I don’t need to use the dreaded mighty mouse (the only Apple product that I hate).

I’ve recently discovered a few very handy text editing shortcuts in OS X that have cut my “mouse time” down dramatically. All of these keyboard shortcuts move the cursor using a combination of COMMAND, CONTROL and the LEFT & RIGHT ARROW keys:

NOTE: If the SHIFT key is pressed with any of these shortcuts, it will highlight text from the current cursor position to where the cursor was moved.

After finding about these simple shortcuts, I wonder how I didn’t know about these earlier.

2 of my favorite shortcuts in Textmate for for code editing are:

I spend a lot of time in stylesheets, so I make use of the block code commenting keyboard shortcut when I’m troubleshooting CSS.

There are a ton more shortcuts I didn’t mention here that I use. For more keyboard shortcut goodness:

• Mac OS X Shortcuts
• Textmate Cheatsheet

What are your favorite shortcuts?