Keyboard Shortcut (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on keyboard shortcuts, thinner than expected on history and empirical efficiency research (flagged “needs more citations” since 2010) — no Remington-typewriter or Larry-Tesler-era history, and no numeric efficiency studies, actually appear in the current article text despite those being plausible-sounding claims.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- A keyboard shortcut assigns an action to one or more keys; simultaneous shortcuts (hold modifier, press/release key, release modifier) are distinct from sequential shortcuts (keys pressed one after another, as in Emacs’s Ctrl+X-prefixed bindings).
- Early Macintosh interface guidelines required that if an application didn’t implement a standard shortcut’s function, it shouldn’t redefine that key for something else — protecting an already-learned customer expectation, not just picking sensible bindings.
- Notation is inconsistent across platforms/documentation: plus- or hyphen-joined key names (“Ctrl+C”), a caret for Ctrl on Unix-derived systems (^C), and Emacs’s own C-x/M-x convention.