Mac App and Finder Shortcuts

So I’ve been playing with this for quite some time. I’ve been trying to “go mouseless” because I know it’s a lot more efficient than the “hunt and peck” habit I have for myself. (I hunt and peck everything. I can’t even type without looking at the keyboard – even though I know where all the keys are without looking. I just have to look for some reason! I think it goes back to high school – I hated my typing teacher, and she hated me. I used to do it because it made her mad LOL Joke’s on me, I guess!)

So going mouseless isn’t easy for me. I’ve downloaded and installed Quicksilver, and I’m slowly getting in the habit of using it, rather than manually searching for what I need. I can’t recall exactly where I first heard about “efficiency with keyboard shortcuts”, but it really piqued my interest, and one of the articles I read said to try a new one every day, and force yourself to pay attention to what you’re doing and use that shortcut until it’s habit. He even insisted that if you open an app, or perform a function using your old method, to close it out and do it again using shortcuts. It annoys yourself to the point that you’ll memorize the shortcut.

Anywhoo…rather than keep a paper or something next to my computer to use as a reference, I decided to get creative and make a background for my desktop. It’s actually working quite nicely. I still have to “hunt and peck” – but now I just do it by looking at my desktop until I have the keystrokes memorized.

Making this was so much fun, I’m thinking of doing some for specific apps, and even one for WordPress (since I use it so much). I had found a really cool app that lets you set a desktop background for each of your Spaces – which is so awesome I can’t even describe it – so switching your background as you swap your defined spaces is even more helpful – you can have several backgrounds for each of your working areas.

<aside>I feel bad for you PC people, because you probably don’t know what I’m talking about – and this type of thing isn’t available for PC’s as far as I know – so I daresay I don’t want to tell you what “Spaces” are for fear of seething jealousy </aside>

So here it is, free for you to take and download (just right-click and save), if you so desire. Right now, this is for the screen resolution I have on my computer, which is 1920×1200. If enough people want a smaller resolution, I could work it up for you But hopefully it helps someone out as much as it’s helping me!

Partial shot of my desktop, using this as a background.