I have been working on an essay about how to gently get started and have fun with keyboard customization. I am finding myself surrounded by programmable keypads…

…and I am going out of my way to try various new shortcuts and automations, big and small, just so I can write a helpful article.

In Photoshop, one of the classic dialogs I use a lot when scanning things is brightness + contrast:

It doesn’t come with a keyboard shortcut, so I mnemonically assigned ⌘B (for Brightness) to it. ⌘B is easier than using your mouse to select a menu option, but still tedious in the long run; every time I have to input brightness and contrast numbers, then click on Use Legacy which is not sticky, then realize that enabling Use Legacy inexplicably resets the values I just typed so I have to input them again…

…which really isn’t as much fun 20th time in a row, 20th year in a row.

So imagine my surprise when one day I invoked the dialog, and it came up looking this out of the box:

It somehow remembered the previous settings. How? Why? Was that a new thing? Was that a bug? Did the stars align or did they misalign? Figuring out how to make it do this every time would have save me so much trouble.

I dug deeper and figured it out. On the way to ⌘B, my fingers grazed the ⌥ key. This invoked a “use same settings as last time” option I never knew existed. This option would have been a lifesaver, has been there for god knows how long, and I just discovered it by accident. Moreover, it wasn’t just a feature of this dialog. One can hold ⌥ for many more Photoshop dialogs – a thoughtful system to make repeated tasks faster.

Damn.

This reminds me of something. I am curious if you’ve seen what I’ve witnessed probably ten times by now: once in a while my corner of the internet overflowing with awe when someone shares that on the iPhone, you can hold the spacebar and it functions as cursor control:

Inevitably, tons of people are always amazed and excited, proclaiming this is the best thing since sliced silicon wafers…

…and that always make me a little sad inside. Both this and my ⌥ story feel like failures of onboarding, of software growing with you and sharing its motor-memory nooks and power-usery crannies. If a helpful thing exists, but people don’t know about it, it feels worse than it not existing. Imagine all these interactions made more pleasant, all these hours saved, all these flow states undisturbed.

I want to spend more time on this blog highlighting onboarding and conveyance done well – I just shared a tiny example a few days ago – particularly since this feels to me like an area underinvested in. If you have a story of an app or a service doing this well, I’d love if you could share it with me so I can highlight it and we can learn from it.