As someone who’s been a keyboard shortcut tzar at a few companies, I developed a certain kinship with the unknown and unnamed others who have the same job elsewhere. It’s a fun but weird challenge, rewarding and unrewarding at the same time, a job of maneuvering a little dinghy between the winds of Motor Memory, the waves of Change Management, and the storms of Shortcut Conventions That Came Before You. It’s a job where you quickly learn you can never really win – but at least you can try not to lose very badly.

One day I’ll write about some of the proudest and darkest moments in my own keyboard shortcut design history, but today let me instead do a short “game recognize game” post. This one is about Arc, a browser that had at least three shortcuts I found myself nodding vigorously at.

In Arc, ⌘S no longer does save, but instead invokes show/​hide sidebar. As far as I can tell, no common shortcut for hiding and showing a sidebar emerged over the last decades, and ⌘S feels like a mnemonically clever takeover of a traditional save shortcut (which in the context of the web doesn’t make sense), and at the same time doesn’t conflict with a lot of web apps, which generally shy away from using it.

Save still does exist, but it has been moved to ⌘⇧S. This historically has been Save As and that also makes sense to me, as you can’t really save a website, just its copy of sorts!

Lastly, Arc’s internal screenshotting function is ⌘⇧2, right next door to the standard ⌘⇧3. Nice.