I've been dealing with repetitive stress injury in my mousing hand for many years. Each time it's flared up, I've managed to find something to delay the inevitable (e.g., switching from traditional mice to trackballs). It's flaring up again and it's clearly being aggravated by any pointing device. I've even tried using pointing devices for my non-dominant hand and even those hurt after a short period of time. While I'd love to go completely pointerless, that's not really a practical option. I've tried KeyCue, but end up not using it because it takes so long to find the right shortcut for a given situation.
So, I'm looking for software that will let me use a pointer device, but when I try to do something with it that has a corresponding keyboard shortcut, I'm shown that particular shortcut. An option to prompt (e.g., a short delay between a pointer click and the action being completed so that I can use the keyboard shortcut or just wait for the action) and an option to require the keyboard shortcut (e.g., it shows me the keyboard shortcut and won't complete the action based just on the pointer click). For example, when I click the x on a tab in my browser I would be given a Growl pop-up to the effect:
Close Tab
⌘W
Something like this would help me learn the keyboard shortcuts while minimizing the impact to my current workflow. Does anybody know of any applications that do this or could easily support this type of user prompting?
Best Answer
While this is not a solution you're asking for, you can try adding shortcut in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts for menu item 'Show Help Menu' (I'm not sure if it's enabled by default).
Then after pressing this shortcut you can type command name and help system will search for that in menu. I guess names of actions fairly often - Close Tab is quite easy to guess, as you just need to start typing 'Close'.
I hope this will help.