The beautiful, quiet power of motor memory

My favourite piece of writing I’ve done about motor memory remains “Shift + Shift” from 2018. I have linked to it over the years, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might find it interesting. Just this week, I have had another similar moment, and amazing in a slightly new way. How many of you tap ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3 to switch between tabs? This convention has been there for as long as I remember, and so has been my fingers’s embrace of it. The system works in Chrome and Safari, in the Terminal (and Ghostty, which even shows the shortcuts on tabs themselves), in Nova, in Figma, and presumably tons of other places: (Just about the only place where it doesn’t work is the Finder, and that’s only because ⌘1/2/3 keys there were first assigned to switching the view style – icons, list, column view – some time in the early 2000s, some years before the tabs came. Hard to change a shortcut people are already used to; luckily, I personally don’t use tabs in Finder.) At this point, I press ⌘1 and…