I use a lot of key commands daily and most of them have been committed to muscle memory where I just think about what I want to do and I don’t think about how to do it. I use cmd-tab and cmd-~ to change applications and windows. In text editors, I’m always using ctrl or cmd with the arrow keys to jump across words and lines of text. In TextMate I use cmd-T to open files, and I use ctrl-opt-V for pasting from JumpCut. In GMail and Google Reader I use j, k, y, [, and ] to navigate (1) through my messages and rss feeds. Amazingly (to me) I seldom confuse these different commands across different applications because their meaning is tied (in my mind, apparently) to specific contexts.

But today, I experienced some bleed-over.

I was just looking at The short – but eventful – life of Ike on The Big Picture and I tried to use j to move to the next picture, rather than scrolling with my mouse wheel. And when it didn’t advance to the next picture, I tapped it a couple more times before realizing that it wasn’t going to help. I think it would be a good feature to add, but for the most part, I just thought it was funny that I kept trying to advance to the next picture without actually thinking about what I was doing.

(1) – GMail & Reader: j = next; k = previous; GMail only: y = archive, [ = archive and move to previous message, ] = archive and move to next message