I get e-mail. A lot of e-mail. On an average day, I'll receive 250 messages across two accounts. I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which does a pretty good job of filtering out those which are pills, porn or pump 'n' dump. However, I still need to read, process and file the rest. As shipped, Thunderbird's only mechanism for moving messages into folders is a mouse-heavy select, drag and drop tool, and I would dearly like to focus more on the content and less on the management.

To my rescue rides an extension called Nostalgy (no idea; don't ask) which was obviously written by a geek who has the same wish. You can tell it's written by a geek because it has an obsessive focus on reducing keystrokes and mouse operations, and you configure it using regular expressions. Regular expressions are a compact but opaque mechanism for defining text-matching rules, examples of which tend to look as if your cat walked over the punctuation section of your keyboard. For example, /^\s*[Gg]erv(ase)?\s*$/ matches various permutations of my name.

This obsession with keystroke minimisation is related to a tribal fear of RSI. RSI is the geek equivalent of tennis elbow or vibration white finger; a potentially career-crippling industrial disease. As people who spend more time with a keyboard than we spend sleeping, over the years we have developed a strong interest in cutting keystroke count.

I've noticed that many ordinary computer users are quite happy typing in text with the keyboard, but when it comes to using it to issue instructions, they suddenly develop keyophobia. It's as if the Shift key is their friend, but the Control key is their enemy. (Caps Lock is, of course, public enemy No 1; I prise it off any keyboard I have control over, and recommend you do the same.) Instead, they take one hand off the keyboard and move it to the mouse, move the mouse to a menu, pull it down, scan through for the right command, choose it, then move their hand back, taking much longer to achieve the same effect.

Using my extensive powers of pop psychology, I suggest that this may be because the mouse is safe and simple; you know where you are with it, and you don't have to learn anything new to use it. It's just point and click, and you can see what command you are running. After all, a user might think, pressing Ctrl-L could do anything, including deleting all their work.

This is an understandable attitude for novice users, but many people who work with a particular application for hours every day still never seem to graduate from that stage to the increased productivity that comes with knowing where the most important shortcuts are.

If you use a word processor or some other text editor, experiment by pressing the arrow keys, Home and End with various combinations of Shift, Control and Alt. You'll find yourself selecting text or zooming around the document in far less time than it takes to reach for the mouse and make the long trek to the scrollbar. In Firefox, Alt-D focusses the URL bar so you can type in a new location, and Ctrl-K jumps straight to the search box.

There are even some keys which are pretty much standard across all applications, which means that effort put in to learn those will pay itself back even quicker. Memorising that Ctrl-S means Save, and hitting it reflexively every time you pause for thought, can turn a word processor crash from a data-destroying disaster to a minor mishap. Knowing that Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V (all conveniently typeable with the left hand, so you can use the right to select text with the mouse) are cut, copy and paste can save minutes of fiddling around with menus or microscopic toolbar buttons.

So pick the application you use most, open up the help (by pressing F1, naturally), the manual or Google, find out the shortcuts for some common commands and get keyed for speed.

Gervase Markham works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet. His blog is Hacking For Christ

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