If you're an Outlook user at work (like myself), this may make you very very happy.
In Outlook, you see, when composing an email, the Ctrl+Enter hotkey can be used to send the message without having to move your hand to your mouse and click Send1. If this is the first you've heard of it, give it a try the next time you compose an email, and you'll probably be addicted.
This is such a natural and simple operation to me that I found myself doing it in Gmail without thinking. Sadly, in the early days of Gmail, no such shortcut existed. I could press Tab, then Enter instead, which was a perfectly workable substitute, with the sole downside of having to remember one shortcut for one application and another for a different one.
Recently, Gmail updated to a new compose interface to allow us to write messages while still viewing our Inbox. Brilliant! I've been using it since it was first offered on an opt-in basis, and I love it.
Today, I loved it even more. I opened a new message, finished writing it, and pressed Ctrl+Enter out of habit... and the message sent!
As a fervent advocate of hotkeys, I've heard numerous people complain that learning this series of hotkeys for this app and that series for that app that does the same thing was just too hard. I have no rebuttal for that - I tend to agree, though I still find the use of hotkeys to be something that saves me hours of time and focus, so I will still slog through attempts to learn them.
I'm glad to see Google adopting hotkeys like this one from software that's already familiar to their users. It will make everyone's lives easier, in the long run.
[1] - As will become rapidly apparent in my postings here, I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts over mouse movements. If this seems like an insignificant thing, think about how often you have to take a hand off of the keyboard, move it to your mouse, select a new field or window, then remove that hand from the mouse and move it back to your keyboard so you can resume typing. If you don't feel that that happens often, rock on!
If - on the other hand - you have just come to the realization that you are frequently wasting time, energy, and focus on a circular motion that, in many cases, can be replaced by pressing a key (or a combination thereof), you are in the same boat as the vast majority of computer users.
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