If there’s one thing I’ve learned about becoming a more productive computer user, it’s this: keyboard shortcuts are the holy grail. In my average workday, I would guess that I could shave over an hour off my time on a lengthy project, just by learning and judiciously applying keyboard shortcuts.

Obviously, this will be most effective for people who already spend most of their time with their fingers on the home row (writers & coders), but many of the best mouse-centric programs often have single-letter or one-handed shortcuts that are very beneficial.

Though I’m planning to write a few posts dealing with specific applications that I use every day, and my favorite or most frequently used shortcuts in those applications, there is also quite a bit that is available by default in most modern operating systems. In this post, I’m going to try to give you a few common shortcuts that will work on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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I don’t remember when I first heard about Linux, or even Unix, but I do know it was a long time ago. My first impression was that Unix was an OS for mainframes and comp. sci majors. When I learned that it was capable of multitasking and running a GUI, my brain nearly fell out. Years later, when I learned of Linux, I got basically the same impression—it seemed like trying to run a mainframe OS on a little desktop box.

At a time when I was spending countless hours of my life endlessly tweaking my Amiga and whatever crap PC I had on hand, or trying to devise the perfect partition/directory structure, spending 3 hours compiling something just to get the machine to boot up seemed like a colossal waste of time. As time went on, the idea of Linux as desktop OS was becoming less ridiculous, but there still seemed to be a giant learning curve. It was hard enough keeping Amiga and DOS cli commands and syntaxes straight, much less learning an entirely new one!

A few years ago, I finally got a Macbook at work, running OS X, which is Unix based. As I learned more about the Mac—and kept running into brick walls of broken or missing functionality—I started to dig into the command-line. I got a little more comfortable with it as time went on, to the point where I was seriously considering a personal switch to OS X, and finally ridding myself of an unfortunate dependence on Windows.

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