Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
Drill the shortcuts for the app you actually use, until your fingers know them.
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About the Learn Keyboard Shortcuts converter
Pick the application you spend your day in and it asks you what a thing is done with — and you answer by actually pressing the keys, not by picking from a list. Get it right and it waits longer before asking again; get it wrong and it comes back soon.
The point is that reading a cheat sheet does not work and everyone keeps doing it anyway. Recognising an answer you are looking at is a completely different act from producing it from nothing, and only the second one is what you need when your hands are on the keyboard and you are mid-thought.
These are flashcards, then, but flashcards you answer with your fingers rather than by turning a card over — which is the whole of the difference between recognising a shortcut and having it.
Why the same cards come back days later
What you have just learned decays fast at first and then slowly, and each time you successfully pull it back out of memory the decay gets shallower. Hermann Ebbinghaus measured this on himself in the 1880s, and the shape of that forgetting curve has survived every attempt to overturn it since. It gives a clear rule: the efficient moment to be tested on something is just before you would have forgotten it.
So each shortcut carries an interval and an ease. Answer correctly and the interval is multiplied by the ease, so the gaps go one day, three days, a week, a fortnight, months. Answer wrongly and it drops back to the start and the ease falls a little, permanently — which means the handful you keep missing come round faster than the rest, without you having to mark them as hard.
Pressing beats recognising
Almost every shortcut list on the internet is something to read. Reading a cheat sheet produces a strong feeling of familiarity and very little durable memory, because recognition is easy and cheap: shown the answer, you nod, and nothing is strengthened. This is the best-established finding in the practical study of learning, and the one most reliably ignored by anyone designing shortcut practice.
Retrieval is what strengthens a memory. Being asked "how do you split the editor" with nothing in front of you, and having to produce it, is effortful in exactly the way that works. Doing it with your fingers rather than your mouth adds the motor pattern, which is what you are really after — the goal is not to know that it is Ctrl+backslash, it is to not have to know.
Twenty, not four hundred
Each deck here is deliberately about twenty shortcuts. A complete reference for any of these applications runs to several hundred, and nobody has ever learned one that way; the long tail is for looking up, not for memorising.
What is kept is the set that earns its place in a normal working day — the palette, the file switcher, the things you do twenty times an hour. Learning twenty properly changes how you work. Skimming four hundred changes nothing.
The shortcuts a web page cannot see
A few combinations belong to the browser window itself rather than to the page inside it: new tab, close tab, new window. They are handled before the page is ever consulted, so no amount of intercepting will catch them — a page cannot stop Ctrl+W closing itself.
Those are asked as something to type instead of something to press. It is a weaker exercise, because typing "Ctrl+W" is nearer to recognition than to doing, and it is much better than closing the tab you are studying in. Everything else is caught by the page and the real shortcut is suppressed, so you can safely press Ctrl+S without a save dialog appearing.
Which keyboard you are on
Mac and Windows shortcuts differ in more than swapping Ctrl for Command. Some are genuinely different keys — VS Code replaces Ctrl+H with Cmd+Option+F for replace, and Excel puts several behind Control rather than Command on a Mac. The deck stores both and shows the one that matches your keyboard, guessed from the browser and switchable if the guess is wrong.
The key names are read from the physical key rather than from the character it produces, so a shortcut behaves the same on QWERTY, AZERTY and Dvorak, and Shift does not turn one key into another as far as matching is concerned.
Frequently asked questions
Which applications are covered?
VS Code, Figma, Excel, Photoshop and Blender, with about twenty of the most useful shortcuts each, for both Mac and Windows keyboards.
Will pressing the shortcut do the thing in my browser?
No. The page intercepts the keystroke, so Ctrl+S will not open a save dialog and Ctrl+F will not open find. The handful the browser refuses to hand over — new tab, close tab, new window — are asked as something to type instead, precisely so that practising them does not close the page.
Where is my progress stored?
In local storage on this device, per deck. There is no account and nothing is uploaded, which also means your progress does not follow you to another computer.
How long does it take to learn a deck?
A first sitting of twenty takes a few minutes. Coming back for the reviews on the days it asks for is what makes them stick — typically a handful of short sessions across a fortnight, after which the gaps are long enough that it stops being a daily thing.
Can I just get a list to print?
Yes. The text mode takes a deck name and returns the whole deck as a plain cheatsheet, for either keyboard.
Why does it not have my application?
Each deck is hand-checked rather than scraped, which keeps it accurate and keeps it short. More can be added; the format is a list of what you want to do and the keys for each platform.