If you’re attending the Fiesta, or even if you aren’t, feel free to come by the Headspring offices on Sunday to learn more about how open source software is written, ask questions about tools you’re using or would like to use, or even kick-start a new open-source project! Please bring a laptop if you can!

Get more details by going to the Google Group for Pablo’s Fiesta Hackathon.

One of the things I had to learn was how blind people used the computer at all. My boss (the owner of the company) was blind and taught me a lot – but he could only work in DOS, as there just weren’t any screen readers for Windows yet. So I had to figure out a lot of things on my own.

As you might guess, blind people have terrible eye-hand coordination, so they never use a mouse. I decided that I would also learn to avoid my mouse as much as possible. One of the best things for me was to just push the mouse out of reach – if it wasn’t there, it made it more inconvenient to use it. Sometimes I would go so far as disconnecting it or dropping down behind my desk. I very quickly learned that the Alt key would let me get to menus, and that the tab key would move me between controls in a dialog. I learned that the Enter key in a dialog would (usually) press the default button, which looked different than other buttons. Over time, I developed a very strong ability to use nothing but the keyboard – and it has helped in many ways.

One thing I noticed as I moved on to other jobs is that many developers had not learned the same keyboard skills that I had. I would frequently wince as I watched someone use the mouse to do something, and then I would gently suggest the (much faster) keyboard way of doing the same thing. One time I was working with someone on a word processing document, and they wanted to change the font of the whole document. I t was painful to watch them first click on the up arrow in the scroll bar to get to the top of the document, then use the mouse to select the whole document. They thought it was pretty cool when I showed them that CTRL+A almost always works to “select all”. One of my other favorites is that when I am filling in a form on a website, when it gets to asking about my address, there is almost always a huge dropdown for State. Since I live in Texas, hitting T twice gets me right where I need to be super-fast. You can also do this for those “what year were you born in” dropdowns – rather than pointing and clicking, just start typing, and it will select the right year.

Pair programming is a great way to share these kinds of tips and tricks. Attending a coding dojo is another one. Of course, the Headspring training classes usually introduce students to all kinds of productivity enhancing techniques too!

There are too many keyboard shortcuts to list here, but start looking around for lists of keyboard shortcuts for the programs you use most often. Use something like Key Jedi when you pair with someone so you can learn they shortcuts they use. and try ‘losing’ your mouse every once in a while to force yourself out of your comfort zone. It may take longer at first, but when you master them, you will be faster than ever.

Here are a few keyboard shortcut references to get you started:

Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows – a nice general list to get you started.

Windows 7 Shortcuts – some duplicates here, but some things that are Windows 7 specific.