The item vs. the position

I spotted this kind of a keyboard shortcut pattern the other day. Here it is in Photoshop:

Here it is in DevonThink:

And here in Linear:

Those “ordinal” keyboard shortcuts feel nice and orderly, and look so elegant, too. But beware! The moment you’ll want to introduce a new option, or even reorder the ones you have, you’ll be in trouble: Either you preserve people’s motor memories, and then the elegant ordering immediately goes to hell – or you will have to change an existing shortcut to something new, and frustrate your users. Might be best to be really confident in your selection being forever locked before attempting this.

But then there’s a similar treatment here in Linear:

Or here in Raycast (when you hold ⌘):

Or here in Ghostty:

Those three look like the same idea, but they worry me less.

Why? Because these shortcuts more clearly point to a position rather than a thing. Here, the mechanics of the UI themselves convey that people, commands, or tabs are going to be moving around. Of course, some users will get used to “1 means assigning to Marcin,” or “⌘3 means the Unsung tab” – the same way we get used to “second item on the Recent list” or “at the top of the third search result page,” if they start repeating as a pattern – but at least it feels to me that the interface here is more honest about what it can promise.

I often think about this, by the way: Not what the interface conveys in the moment, but what it promises in the long run.

#change management #flow #keyboard