How Many Keys to Start Composing an Email
I was recently reading Rands in Repose Article Saving Seconds, and took the challenge to how many keystrokes would it take for me to start writing an e-mail message.
My first go was a little bit variable.
It consisted of:
- a variable number of CMD-tabs to get to Mail.App
- CMD-N to create the message.
After reading the true statement that creating e-mail is a common enough task that it should deserve optimisation, I figured that I'd put in the effort to write the AppleScript to optimise it. So, with the combination of AppleScript, and Butler, I have ended up with:
- a single CMD-OPT-CTRL-M to start up Mail.App (I like using CMD-OPT-CTRL for all my Butler shortcuts).
The AppleScript is simply:
1 | tell |
1 | application "Mail" |
1 | activate set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true} |
1 | end tell |