You'd notice that these keys form a convenient "diamond" on a keyboard. CP/M had allotted control-P to "print the text being returned on/off" so you could get a copy of a report-to-screen by pressing ^P and then trigger the process by pressing "return" (got renamed "enter" later) - no graphics in those days - all character! In those days of CP/M, there were no cursor keys, so control-S was used by Wordstar for cursor-left, control-D for cursor-right, control-E for up and control-X for down by one position/line. Some imaginative answers here - and the real solution is Wordstar, which was published in 1978. There's probably a bunch of other reasons too. Once you begin using modifier keys (ctrl/alt/shift) you get to a situation where some combinations are impossible to press unless you're a career pianist, especially if you don't want to drop the mouse in order to do so.A classic one is using WASD instead of the arrow keys for navigation in computer games.
The +/- and ]/[ example is another common one. As Ameen mentioned, many actions are logically paired, and since hotkeys are usually used by power users, we can assume that placing them together would be more important than making them easy to remember.Some people would say "increase/decrease", others would think it's "smaller/bigger" font, maybe others would use something else. Using "ctrl+" increases or decreases the font size in a number of apps. Many actions don't have a very clear name as such.For instance, the Dutch word for "print" is "afdruk", so they'd map it to "Ctrl+A", which already has the standard meaning of "select all". What's worse is that the languages that do use the Latin alphabet might have a different action "intuitively mapped" to the same letter, in which case the mapping is worse than useless - it's actively confusing. Some languages don't use the Latin alphabet, in which case the mapping is useless. And you might have something else actively running, like a music player. For instance, you're in Gmail which has some hotkeys, but it's running in a browser, which has its own hotkeys, and the browser is running on an OS with a different set of hotkeys. While it's possible that the above can be managed within a specific app (if it's small enough), it becomes impossible once you take into account that you're often using a number of apps at the same time.Switch to the second, or another "representative" letter, but theĭeeper you get, the less intuitive and memorable it becomes. Many actions have the same first letter.It would be intuitive and easy to remember. Yes, it would be very nice to have all our actions mapped to a key that begins with the first letter of the actions. The whole hotkeys issue is a good example of the "intuitiveness vs efficiency/ease of use" trade-off.
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