Using the keyboard

Learn a little at a time

Start with opening applications, switching windows, and moving between workspaces. Those are the things you do all day. Everything else can wait until you actually need it.

Pick two or three actions and repeat them until your hands stop asking your brain for permission. Keep the reference nearby for everything else. This is learning a tool, not auditioning for a video in which a person opens fourteen terminals while increasingly urgent music plays.

You are learning a tool, not auditioning for a video.

Let the windows arrange themselves

Tiling is odd for about as long as it takes to stop dragging windows into position. Open your editor and a terminal next to each other. Notice the absence of a small, unnecessary chore.

If you spend the first few minutes trying to put every window exactly where your previous desktop put it, pause. Let this one show you its arrangement. You may like it. You may want to change it. Both are useful discoveries, and neither requires declaring war on overlapping rectangles as a concept.

Keep the reference handy

The official manual has the current bindings and instructions for changing them. This page deliberately does not maintain a second, eventually incorrect copy. We have enough problems keeping the sarcasm up to date.

Looking up a shortcut is allowed, even after you have been using the system for a while. The people who appear to know every binding also forget things. They are simply not recording those moments. Write down the ones you need, and change awkward combinations using the maintained guidance rather than performing finger exercises you actively dislike.

Keep the mouse

There is no prize for refusing to click a perfectly good button. Use the mouse when it is useful, the keyboard when it is quicker, and whichever input device your hands are comfortable with. The point is to remove little chores from your day. Replacing them with a rigid code of conduct would be an impressively roundabout way to recreate the problem. Your mouse may appreciate hearing this directly.