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Connor J Kelly

On Keyboard Shortcuts

Who cares about keyboard shortcuts?

Its an honest question. Do you care about keyboard shortcuts?

First, lets get a formal definition of a shortcut: I like this: “A combination of keys that produces an output other than what is explicitly described in the keycodes.”

I like to think about it like this:

  • you press ‘A’, and it produces an ‘a’. Not a shortcut.
  • you press ‘Shift + A’, and it produces an ‘A’. Not a shortcut.
  • you press ‘CTRL + A’, and it selects everything in the selected scope. This is a shortcut.

This is kind of a dumb example, but it elucidates an interesting point: In general, there are two kinds of keystrokes: boring ones where wysisyg (What you see is what you get) and interesting ones that produce an action. This does also depend on your environement as well. Take for example, the difference between typing ms word and playing a videogame, lets say call of duty. In word, if you press ‘W’ in word, it produces a ‘W’, it moves your character forward. So for the sake of simplicity, lets assume that here I’m talking about a relatively standard desktop environment, like Windows or MacOS.

Customization

Lets take a keyboard shortcut that really sucks to hit. “CTRL + SHIFT + F5”. From what I remember, this is the JetBrains shortcut to end a debugging session; that doesnt matter, but what does matter is that this keycombo really sucks. On most keyboards you are going to need to hit 4 keys: CTRL, SHIFT, FN, & F5; mainly because most people have the fn keys setup for dual purpose media and aux keys. Your’re also gonna have to stretch your hand a lot, considering that you are most likely gonna try to hit all the modifer keys with one hand, and the F5 key with the other.

So how do you deal with this? You can either ask phpstorm to change the keycode for the action, or you can make the keys lot easier to hit.

Changing the keycombo for a action might be fine for a few, but its just not scalable. You have to set it up on every instance of the program, and it doesnt work on other peoples devices, and it could very easily get reverted with every single update. I’ve found one example where it might be fine, and thats in VSCode, where your custom keycodes can be exported.