One of the ways you can speed up software development is to learn keyboard shortcuts. If you start searching you will discover your computer has way more keyboard shortcuts than you ever imagined. Even more exciting is web applications like GitHub have keyboard shortcuts as well. On many websites Shift+/ will reveal a screen of shortcuts. Unfortunately too many applications have different conventions for similar actions, and this makes keyboard shortcuts harder to learn.

The best example is a quick open and command palette action. On GitHub’s website you can access these with Command + K or Shift + Command + K respectively. Try using Panic’s Nova text editor and it’s Shift + Command + O and Shift + Command + P. Same thing in Tower, but you’re hitting Shift + Command + A for a “Quick Actions” dialog which looks similar to a command palette. There is little consistency among apps and this makes learning these shortcuts more challenging.

I wondered out loud why this might be, and a colleague astutely pointed out that many shortcuts for web applications have to avoid colliding with the shortcut namespace for their enclosing browser. They can’t have an open dialog with Command + O because it is already claimed for opening files, and Command + P is claimed for printing. The desktop shortcuts make more sense from an association standpoint (O = open, P = palette) while the web shortcuts are a compromise.

There is no way to learn all keyboard shortcuts. Yet making similar shortcuts map to similar actions among apps would be a huge win to reducing the cognitive load of using and learning them. For now Mac users can configure their desktop application keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences —> Keyboard —> Shortcuts. I just wish they arrived more consistent out of the box.