The various discussions in these forums over the past couple of years got me to thinking (yeah, now there’s a first!) about DTPO and how we each subscribe to one set of usage philosophies or another. Some like things to be organized with toolbar choices (see exhibit A).
Others feel more comfortable with a myriad of keyboard shortcuts, which might only be possible with an adjunct keypad comprising nine keys, all of which are special modifier keys similar in function to the control, command, shift, escape, and alt keys. My “mini” keyboard has some 60 keys on it, not including the modifier keys. That means at present I can one (or more) of five keys in conjunction with the rest of the keys, meaning I can have appx 5 million key combinations. With nine modifier keys, this increases to roughly 14 billion. Of course we have to subtract out all the symbols and so forth created by the alt key, and the upper case characters produced by the shift key, but that still leave an almost uncountable number of keyboard shortcut combinations. Whew! I’d need a second table PC just to keep track of them all! Or I could get some outfit to provide me with an application-specific keyboard skin (exhibit B) that I could refer to when I forget which modifier key goes with what character to produce a certain result.
This is where the “memory” in the subject line comes in: At 65+ I’m rapidly running out of meat-based RAM and the meat-based hard drive is constantly being defragmented. Darn old organic memory anyway.
Tod, my meat-RAM is probably more limited than yours (I’ll be 78 this month). I doubt that at any one time I can hold in my head more than 7 or 8 keyboard shortcuts. I can always remember and use a few short ones, such as Command-A, Command-W, Command-C and the Services command to capture rich text. I refuse to use any of those weird ones that would require me to stand on my head and wiggle my ears.
Another failing that disqualifies me from being a ‘keyboarder’ is that I can never remember all those tricks (including switching among panes) to use the keyboard instead of the mouse to move to various parts of the screen.
I’m sometimes awed by people who pound away at the keyboard, calling up from memory hundreds of commands and zipping the cursor all over the screen in order to avoid touching the mouse. I can’t do that.
But then I remember that Apple has done a lot of Human Interface tests, pitting keyboarders and mousers against each other in timed tests, and chuckle to myself.
Time after time, test after test, Apple found that the mousers got the task done more quickly. But the keyboarders still thought they were faster.
I’m glad I use a Mac, with both a keyboard and mouse. Great combination! That leaves enough room in my head to think about the project I’m working on. I have to live within my limitations.
Mousers would win provided they can remember where to find that darned command. (Is History under Window, Tools, where?) My current favorite keyboard shortcut is command-? so I can type in the name of the command and find it that way. When I start forgetting the names of the commands, I’m going to be in trouble.
