Xah Lee has a self-confessed obsession with keyboards. He’s particularly interested in their ergonomics and features that can enhance productivity. Not everyone agrees with his take on these things but his views are thoughtful and often useful. In a recent post he addresses ways in which the underused function keys can help increase productivity.
For example, Lee points out that most of us spend the majority of our time in 3 or 4 applications: editor, browser, mail, say. He recommends dedicating some function keys that will switch directly to these apps. The normal way of doing this is with ALT-TAB or CMD-TAB but this requires multiple keystrokes and that you look to see which app you switched to and perhaps TAB some more to get to the right one. By assigning a function key, only a single keystroke is required.
Lee has more suggestions for how to enhance productivity with function keys and also discusses how to assign them under Windows and Mac OS X. It’s an interesting post and if you care about keyboard shortcuts that can speed things up, you should head on over and take a look.