Killer Keystrokes
If there were a personality test for computer users, you would need look no further than how a person uses his or her keyboard. Indeed, one’s input device of choice speaks volumes about character, pragmatism, even philosophy.
Are you impatient? You’re probably a keyboard-aholic.
Are you reactive and pensive? You like the mouse.
Compassionate? Mouse-lover.
A bit ruthless at work? Keystroker.
Hopelessly romantic? Mouse all the way.
We’re not here to draw any value judgments about the mouse-vs.-keyboard debate. We recognize that matters of personal preference are completely valid determinants in choosing one over the other. Anything that enhances one’s computing experience has to be a good thing and far be it from us to criticize any practice that brings enjoyment to the process.
Having said that, there are two conclusions that we find to be inescapable:
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Pressing a keystroke is faster than clicking an icon.
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Pressing keystrokes usually involves less repitition than mousing and places you at lower risk of injury.
While we can debate preference all night long, there seems little room for debate on points above. If we were to have a race to see who could save a drawing in CorelDraw and export it to a JPG file the quickest, there would be no contest:
MOUSE: Move cursor up to Standard toolbar and click Save (about two seconds).
KEYBOARD: Press Ctrl+S (less than .5 seconds).
MOUSE: Move over to Export icon (about one second)
KEYBOARD: Press Crl+E (less than .5 seconds).
MOUSE: Drop down Save as Type menu and scroll list to JPG format (between three and seven seconds).
KEYBOARD: Press Tab to move to Save as Type field and press J to jump to JPG (about one second).
Final Score: Mouse 6 or more, Keyboard 2.
Dissenters would be right in arguing that speed should not be the only criterion to judge the merits of one technique over the other. We’ll leave it to you to attach whatever value you want to the raw time it takes to perform various commands. And without a doubt, using the mouse does not carry the same risk of error; let’s have another speed contest and add one twist. Let’s measure the time it takes to cut an object to the Clipboard:
MOUSE: Move cursor to Standard toolbar and click Cut (about two seconds).
KEYBOARD: Reach for Ctrl+X, but press Ctrl+Z by mistake. Redo the last operation that was inadvertently undone by the Ctrl+Z and then press Ctrl+X (at least five seconds).
Corel products, like most graphical applications, are mouse-centric. You are creating things on a canvas and that involves moving around the canvas and doing things to it. You need your mouse for that, or a track ball, drawing tablet, or some other device that directs a cursor to specific places.
This entire discussion reaches a better plane when you talk about using the mouse and the keyboard together, and this point was really driven home by a recent pro-bono project for the local girl scouts chapter and its annual Daddy-Daughter Dance. With a sports theme and the expectation that 150 girls and their dads would be attending in athletic attire of some sort, we wondered if there weren’t a better way to photograph them than in the corner of a gymnasium. So we underwent the task of blending them into more engaging venues than the corner of a gym.
Thanks to a white bedsheet as a backdrop, masking out the girls and dads was easier than it might have been, although the wispy hair of 11-year-olds, the spiky hair from dads much younger than I, and tennis racquets that we did not think to hold in front of bodies all proved challenging. Even with a community project, one’s own standard dictates that the job be done right. And no matter how well the masking goes, there are always the so-called haloes to contend with—areas around the edge of the masked object that produces a harsh contrast. That means a fair amount of tweaking around those edges:
You can see how tight the zoom is here. This translates into a lot of panning around in search of bad edges. This is obviously a mouse-centric operation, as eliminating the haloes involves brushing over them with the Object Transparency Brush Tool, panning the screen to find others, and then returning to the transparency tool to resume the brushing. The mouse-only proposition involves so much excessive clicking as to make physical stress practically inevitable:
1. Mouse to the Toolbox, click the appropriate icon, wait for it to flyout (and hope you chose the right one), and click the Object Transparency Brush tool.
2. Do the work, then mouse back to the Toolbox, click the Zoom tool, wait for it to flyout, and click the Pan tool.
3. Pan the screen and then click again on the transparency tool.
If you were being paid by the pixel, all of this mousing away from the image and then back might make sense. Instead, all you are doing is inviting finger, wrist, and arm fatigue.
Fortunately, Corel’s products are among the best at eliminating tedium. Most programs that offer hotkeys to their commands use Ctrl, Alt, Shift, or combinatinos of all in conjunction with a particular key. Adobe Premiere, for instance, offers up Ctrl+Shift+/ to Duplicate an element on its timeline, and here in Dreamweaver, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+0 zooms the display to fit the width. But when you work in Draw and Paint, it is rare that you actually have your cursor planted in a string of text. Therefore, most keys on the keyboard sit unused in their unshifted (un-alted? un-ctrl’d?) state. Corel developers were the first to realize that these keys were all available to be used as hotkeys (Adobe followed suit about three years later).
Knowing this pays enormous dividends for you. If you take 30 seconds to hover over the tools you use, you will invariably find a key that activates it. These keys probably do not make mnemonic sense, but you’ll live. In the case of the task at hand, I found the following:
Name of Tool |
Activation |
|
Object Transparency Brush |
3 |
|
Panning |
H |
Having discovered these (and by the way, I never remember that 3 equals the OTB tool, so I have to discover this over and over again), now I can keep my cursor right where it wans to be—hovered over the area of the image that I need to work on. Pressing 3 activates the tool I need to do the job and H activates the Pan tool so I can move to the next area that needs attention.
And it gets better. Once I have activated those two tools in succession, Space toggles between them. My left thumb rests comfortably on Space, my right hand does the actual work, and my focus never needs to divert away from the task. Economy of motion, economy of effort, maximum attention to the task at hand.
Anytime a job in Draw or Paint involves the moving back and forth between two tools, the first thing I do is "load" them into the Shift key by simply activating them one after the other. I can think of few strategies that pay such immediate dividends of health and productivity and I am grateful to Corel for showing this kind of foresight.
How about you? Do you have a favorite shortcut that helps you stay quick as well as sane? Share it with us and we’ll share it with everyone...