Keyboard shortcuts, aka ‘hotkeys’, are combinations of keystrokes that you can use to be greatly increase your productivity by being faster on the computer.
Master these and you’ll get WAY more stuff done on the computer, and much faster.
You’ll also shock anyone watching you use a computer - seriously it happens to me everytime some watches me use a computer their brain explodes. 🤯
Modifier keys are the keys that you add when you want to do a specific action that usually applies globally.
For example, if you want to scroll through your open applications, you can use the ‘Command + Tab’ hotkey. But what if you want to go backwards?
Then you’ll add the modifier key “shift”, which will typically take any hotkey action and do the reverse. ‘Shift + Command + Tab’ scrolls through your open applications, in reverse.
Here’s a list of common keyboard symbols (aka Glyphs) that you’ll need to know to read keyboard shortcuts. The table is for Mac. Windows doesn’t use glyphs officially, but we use them interchangeably on the hotkeys table.
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💡 To use the “Unicode” method for writing the symbols, you have to be first holding the “option” (⌥
) key.
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