> Now, take @gruseom's idea of a visual "goal" that you are chasing, and I think this could be intensely valuable.
Yes, they really need to take the words out of the equation. It's just a superfluous modality that gets in between the muscle memory, the goals and the training.
Of course, this method will get you familiar with shortcuts rather quickly (I only tried the Vim ones), but then, so does printing out a cheat sheet, or reading some tutorial and an afternoon of practice. While I do believe ShortcutFoo does manage to teach that more effectively than those methods, that's not where it could really shine.
To become a pro text-editor user, you really need to go beyond that, hence muscle memory, not just "memory". You don't merely need to remember the shortcut for "go one word back" when presented with the written goal "go one word back", no you must intuitively know the shortcut as soon as you identify the goal already on an abstract level.
Even with a simple default editing control like this text box: As I'm typing these words, I'm not thinking of every letter I type, I don't think about whether I need to "move cursor left five times" or "move cursor left one word" or "delete word to the left" etc, I'm thinking about the sentences and ideas I want to put into this post and operate the keyboard to make that happen--and any literal textual description of shortcuts and movement commands would really just get in the way with my thought process.
I haven't seen @gruseom's post yet, so maybe s/he had the same idea but: Something like a phantom cursor that indicates "get the cursor to here" or half-fade a word that you must delete?
But that may become too low level once you get more advanced. What you really need is a sort of visual indication that shows a diff between the original text and the goal text, you get to look at it to take it in while a quick countdown timer goes 3-2-1 and from that point it times how quickly you can edit to the target and how many keystrokes it takes you to do it.
(could even make it a colour-coded actual diff, then people get to train reading diffs as well :) [something I need to practice myself])
Yes, they really need to take the words out of the equation. It's just a superfluous modality that gets in between the muscle memory, the goals and the training.
Of course, this method will get you familiar with shortcuts rather quickly (I only tried the Vim ones), but then, so does printing out a cheat sheet, or reading some tutorial and an afternoon of practice. While I do believe ShortcutFoo does manage to teach that more effectively than those methods, that's not where it could really shine.
To become a pro text-editor user, you really need to go beyond that, hence muscle memory, not just "memory". You don't merely need to remember the shortcut for "go one word back" when presented with the written goal "go one word back", no you must intuitively know the shortcut as soon as you identify the goal already on an abstract level.
Even with a simple default editing control like this text box: As I'm typing these words, I'm not thinking of every letter I type, I don't think about whether I need to "move cursor left five times" or "move cursor left one word" or "delete word to the left" etc, I'm thinking about the sentences and ideas I want to put into this post and operate the keyboard to make that happen--and any literal textual description of shortcuts and movement commands would really just get in the way with my thought process.
I haven't seen @gruseom's post yet, so maybe s/he had the same idea but: Something like a phantom cursor that indicates "get the cursor to here" or half-fade a word that you must delete? But that may become too low level once you get more advanced. What you really need is a sort of visual indication that shows a diff between the original text and the goal text, you get to look at it to take it in while a quick countdown timer goes 3-2-1 and from that point it times how quickly you can edit to the target and how many keystrokes it takes you to do it. (could even make it a colour-coded actual diff, then people get to train reading diffs as well :) [something I need to practice myself])