Where do keyboard shortcuts come from?
Macs and PCs have offered shortcuts (AKA hotkeys) to help users execute various functions. If you’ve ever wondered where the heck they come from, WSJ’s Dalvin Brown tracked down a legend in the keyboard shortcut game to get the scoop.
The 1st keyboard shortcuts
Control-Alt-Delete was created by David Bradley in the early 1980s
- It became a hit among IBM employees and eventually got programmed into the company’s original PC
- One of the first keyboard shortcuts was created at Xerox in the 1970s and included cut, copy, paste
Beyond Control-Alt-Delete
The challenge for engineers is threefold: Make shortcuts easy to remember, Ensure they make sense with existing keyboards, and Develop combinations that don’t trigger other shortcuts.
- Shortcuts that are used more often tend to include simpler key combinations (e.g., copy and paste).
- Less frequent shortcuts include more keys, such as force quitting an app.
Modern apps are ushering in a new era of shortcuts
Companies like Notion, Superhuman, and Figma have created their own shortcuts to help users save time by ditching the mouse
- Use The Keyboard lists shortcuts from a range of popular apps and websites
- Both Mac OS and Windows allow users to create shortcuts
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