If you are anything like me, you have to work with tens of applications simultaneously in your computer. You are grappling with problems, uncertainty, goals and ideas. You have to make progress in small increments. And you have to move fast, otherwise, that brilliant idea you just had is going to vanish from your mind. Does that feel familiar?

One thing that has helped me a lot for increasing my agility and reducing cognitive burden is to use keyboard shortcuts for many common actions. The problem is that there are so many apps, so many actions, so many shortcuts, multiple OSs and platforms. This creates a combinatorial explosion.

After getting tired of searching for the 100th time how to make a Header 1 in Google docs, I gave up any hope of remembering them all off the top of my head. That is why I decided to create a database. In retrospect, this was my first step towards building my External Brain. As time went by, I began adding linux and windows console commands as well.

Here is a list of some apps and commands that I’ve included so far:

• Apps: Firefox, JupyterLab, VSCode, GitKraken, LibreOffice, Cmder, Spotify, Gmail, Google Drive, Evernote, SublimeText3, Excel, ClickUp, Obsidian
• CLI tools: conda, docker, mysql, git
• Native console commands for Linux (bash) and Windows (cmd)

Having this list of shortcuts and commands helps me achieve a state of flow. It saves me time. It helps me keep my fragile working memory lean and functional (as much as possible).

The list has currently more than 270 entries and it keeps evolving and growing.

So, without further ado, here it is, the ultimate keyboard shortcut database: