GNOME Do is a nice app for GNOME. The default keybinding is Super+Space and it searches through many contexts, including your favourite music player, IM contacts, and bookmarks, as well as launches apps.

But then again, I just realised the last post was 5 months ago =/ Sorry for bring back a dead conversation, but I already typed it all out so might as well post

2 seconds ain’t a lot, but if it’s a common operation that is repeated over and over again, those seconds quickly add up to minutes of wasted time. Couple this with the idea that there might be hundreds of thousands of people using a program… And suddenly every tiny change to the interface results in net global savings of years worth of “labor” daily… Cutting 2 seconds out of an operation * repeated 30 times a day by * 100,000 users… It adds up quickly.

Bad microwave designs have cost the human race millions of years worth of wasted time collectively…

-Chris

Basically, perform your cmd-space shortcut to pull up spotlight and start typing the app’s name. If the app you’re after is first in the list, you don’t need to to cursor down to it, just hold CMD and it’ll auto-highlight the top hit, then whilst holding CMD, hit enter (aka return) and Bob’s your Uncle!

You can also navigate the menus from the keyboard in OS X. Hit Ctrl-F2 and it’ll highlight the Apple menu. Then just start typing the name of the menu you want and it’ll highlight. Use cursor-down to open a menu and again start typing to jump to an item. Hit enter/return (same thing on a Mac) to activate the highlighted item. Hit Esc at any time to exit the menus (similarly, if dragging a bunch of files and you want to stop the process mid-drag, hitting Esc aborts the action and leaves the files where they were).

There are a multitude of keyboard shortcuts for things like this that aren’t widely documented in OS X, but if you do a google you’ll pick up some new ones.

From my own personal experience, I use kbd shortcuts all the time to save trawling to the menu time and time again, so even when using the mouse my left hand tends to rest on the kbd, which means that a combination of inputs is the fastest method for me. Most people save a lot of time with the basic mnemonic shortcuts (Cmd-O for Open, Cmd-A Select All, Cmd-S Save, Cmd-P Print, Cmd-Q Quit etc etc etc), which once second nature ARE much faster. This sets them on the road to learning the shortcuts for their most commonly used functions in apps (esp. ones using additional modifiers such as shift, option, and/or ctrl) – which is a hell of a lot fast than navigating the mouse to the menu, dragging down, opening sub-menu, dragging down, selecting item with a click – FACT! But basically the fastest input method is a combination of keyboard AND mouse (whichever’s nearest at that moment).

Additioanlly – in OS X it’s also possible to configure your own kbd shortcuts for items that don’t have them by default through the System Preferences>Keyboard & Mouse>Keyboard Shortcuts. For anyone with arthritis, you can turn on additional aids, such as sticky keys or trackpad/mouse gestures (which allow things like click-lock for dragging without holding down the mouse button if it’d be otherwise painful) in System Preferences>Universal Access.

Just some info.

I agree that the mouse is not good for text entry! Navigating long lists can be very fast with a mouse. Personally, I have my mouse set to “jump to here” when I click in the scroll bar (outside of the scroll bar’s sliding button), so navigating a long list with the mouse can be done quickly. I don’t believe keyboard scrolling is fast at all in comparison to the mouse. I’ll admit to using the keyboard for filtering fairly often. I don’t know that it actually saves time, but it is very convenient.

I keep about 30-40 items in my Dock, which stays hidden to save screen space. However, by grouping the items in a meaningful manner (for example, Word, TextEdit and Text Wrangler are grouped side by side), at any given time I’ve got a fairly accurate idea where an item is located in the Dock even without seeing it. I don’t think I could launch as quickly using the mouse if I were clicking on icons on my desktop. It’s the Dock’s location on the screen edge that makes it so efficient.

I’ve found that the (two key) keyboard shortcuts I use most tend to be left handed, since I don’t need to leave the mouse to use them. I didn’t plan that, it just worked out that way. (CMD-z/x/c/v/a/s/f/g/q/w/space on the left compared to CMD-i/down on the right).

I also tend to keep my desktop and preferences tweaked for efficient mouse use, using Fitts’ Law (Bigger targets can be acquired faster than smaller targets; closer targets can be acquired faster than more distant targets.) as a guideline. For example, hovering in my upper left corner(huge target) shows all windows via Expose. I keep a Finder window in the same corner, as high as possible, and moved slightly off screen, just enough so the close button is no longer visible. This serves two purposes. First, it puts the sidebar items on a screen edge, effectively increasing their size, greatly reducing access time by mouse. Second, it ensures that that particular Finder window is close to the mouse when “show all windows” is activated, which also reduces access time.

Do such tweaks save time compared to other methods? Absolutely. Do they save enough time to make a big difference at the end of the day? For the overwhelming majority of cases, not really. Once in a great while it might make a difference, but there are a hundred and one ways in which I can squander away any time savings. Generally speaking, keyboard versus mouse is all about personal preference.

I have nothing against keyboard shortcuts. I use a handful of them myself on a regular basis. However, it sometimes bothers me when keyboard shortcuts are promoted as a way to save time and increase productivity, since that is not the case. Personally, I think people are best served knowing as many different ways to accomplish a particular task as possible, including keyboard shortcuts. I think increasing our familiarity with our OS and applications can save us time (I’ve no evidence to support this assertion, but it seems quite reasonable.), regardless of our preferred method of input.