We are all familiar with Ctrl + X/C/V (or Cmd + for Mac users) and probably use it more often than we can imagine. Earlier in the day I was musing over how we take keyboard shortcuts for granted and how difficult it’d have been to do our tech activities without them. Of course, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to not have keyboard shortcuts (just a few clicks saved here and there, one can argue) but the reality is often not so simple.

Everyone who writes documents knows how painful it is to use the mouse over and over again (if not the mouse, some combination of a couple or more keys to get the menu out, and then some more key presses to get to the right menu item). Doing it several hundreds of times while editing or writing could test the patience of even the most easygoing document writers! In this regard, I believe keyboard shortcuts did for the keyboard what the printing press did for writing by making things much, much easier to perform (or am I making too big a leap here?)

Gamers wouldn’t know what it’s like not to have keyboard shortcuts - RPGs wouldn’t even exist without having shortcuts readily available (imagine having to go through a ton of clicks just to equip yourself with some spell). It’d be such a frustrating experience that you’d rather not play the game at all!

Programmers…well, what would Vim be without shortcuts! (Okay, not necessarily Vim but any text editor out there. No editor war needed here.)

Someone decided to do a nice experiment in this regard. Check it out!