My favourite piece of writing I’ve done about motor memory remains “Shift + Shift” from 2018. I have linked to it over the years, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might find it interesting.

Just this week, I have had another similar moment, and amazing in a slightly new way.

How many of you tap ⌘1, ⌘2, ⌘3 to switch between tabs? This convention has been there for as long as I remember, and so has been my fingers’s embrace of it. The system works in Chrome and Safari, in the Terminal (and Ghostty, which even shows the shortcuts on tabs themselves), in Nova, in Figma, and presumably tons of other places:

(Just about the only place where it doesn’t work is the Finder, and that’s only because ⌘1/2/3 keys there were first assigned to switching the view style – icons, list, column view – some time in the early 2000s, some years before the tabs came. Hard to change a shortcut people are already used to; luckily, I personally don’t use tabs in Finder.)

At this point, I press ⌘1 and ⌘2 and ⌘3 without thinking, just as instinctively as I would ⌘Z for undo, or ⌘C for copy.

So instinctively, in fact, that last week I was looking at Messages, I wanted to switch to the group chat, and my fingers just reached for ⌘1:

I have never done it before. I have not heard this was possible, nor seen it announced in the menu, or a tooltip, or via onboarding. I didn’t even think about it. My fingers just… did it. Completely on their own.

And it worked.

I was just there, looking at my hand amazed, piecing together what just happened as if I were watching someone else’s actions.

It’s funny to pause and think about such a seemingly tiny thing. After all, this happens all the time. Every time I slam Esc to dismiss a dialog I never closed before, every time I press ⌘V to paste something in a new location, every time I tab from one field to another in an app I just installed – sure, these might be system defaults in various places, but I see them break once in a while; when they do work someone might deserve credit for wiring them properly, even if I take it for granted.

In these moments, you only notice things going badly; as a matter of fact on the same day I pasted some bolded text into the very same Messages app, and tried to press ⌘B to undo the bolding – and that didn’t work.

And I think that’s why that ⌘1 in Messages is worth a little celebration. Over the years, enough apps and websites and operating systems quietly decided to spend extra effort to participate in the ⌘123 convention, together building a dependable interaction system that more and more people’s motor memories could learn to trust over time.

That included mine, including one extra thing that separates it from the story I linked in the first paragraph – and one you probably already noticed.

The Messages app doesn’t have tabs. My motor memory kicking in wasn’t just a recall of something that I’ve already done before. Somehow, in my brain, this convention felt so great that it quietly extended from “⌘1 = first tab” to “⌘1 = first content thingy,” without me even realizing.

And that’s so amazing, right? It’s stuff like this why I keep harping on Safari’s problematic tabs and other compromised interaction systems, and that’s why today I raise a small toast to the designer at Apple who thought about ⌘1 in such a clever way.