Oh, No! It's the Return of the Keyboard Shortcut!

The conventional wisdom is that icons are pretty and shiny and that keyboard shortcuts are ugly and scary. But for applications or Web sites used every day, keyboard shortcuts are far more appealing in actual practice. The reason is that keyboard shortcuts become habits that you can do without even thinking. Muscle memory takes over, and they become second nature. But icons always require mental processing and time-consuming, spastic lurching from mouse to keyboard and back. This is a nugget of geek wisdom lost to the sands of time.

Fast forward to 2008 and the era of online productivity applications, which are on balance even more icon-happy and less keystroke-friendly than the world of Windows, Mac and Linux desktop applications.

I have, however, been gravitating lately to two sites that I use all day, every day, which are by far the most powerful and fastest sites I’ve found. One is an online to-do list called Todoist, and the other is a search site called Quick.as.

Besides being super fast to use and ultra minimalist in design, these two sites have something else in common: their power comes from the use of KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS.