This is a bidirectional extension of knowledge.
If I know that shift always means adjusting/changing/creating a selection then I know that for all key-presses with shift, I’m doing some sort of action on a selection. If adding shift to a key always does the same thing, then that’s 1/4 (or 1/8 if we’re splitting L/R variants) the number of things we need to remember. Can we reduce the cognitive load? Assign consistent meanings to modifiers. That might sound incredible, but it presents a problem: remembering 1,000+ things is hard. If we differentiate between left and right modifiers, then nearly 4,500 commands are possible! Include the number pad and we’re north of 5,500. That means your average keyboard can execute well over 1,000 commands without issue. These are keys that allow us to use a single key for up to 16 different commands. To start this out I’d like to discuss the fact that we use keyboards with Modifiers: Control, Alt/Option, Command/Win and Shift (and possibly others!)
Now I need to think about what they mean in the context of hotkeys. In the last post I changed what hotkeys mean in the context of mouse modifiers.