What is the most cognitively complex action that you personally can do subconsciously with muscle memory? Thinking about complex IDE interactions, or advanced command-line usage.

must be some git command

I use Figma on a weekly basis to make diagrams. Its not really whats its ‘meant’ to be used for, but sue me 😛. Figma on a macbook trackpad is one of the few times I’ve felt a truly DIRECT connection to the thing I’m making, to borrow Bret’s lingua franca. I can move / edit / tweak at the speed of thought, besides video games its the most extension-of-my-body-/flow-think-at-speed-of-thought tool I get to engage with. I’ve built up tons of muscle memory, can do pretty much everything with keyboard shortcuts. Good keyboard shortcuts + designed for trackpad from day 1 means that Figma mostly lives at my subconscious level and ‘fades’ to the background

Probably editing text paragraphs in vi, can do advanced things fast just with keys and chords Another situation is firefighting on servers when customers are being affected - that's all reflexive investigation of network, disk, local processes and files - can really only use the tools I already know, it's stressful to step back and read man or do research when I need to find a different technique In fact I committed to vanilla vi even for local development so I can use it on server anytime at the drop of a hat

A great question! "Subconsciously" — probably text selection, copy, paste covering several lines. The more complicated activities can't be done with muscle memory as they require too much coordination with the UI and potential for slip-ups. I don't call it muscle memory if you can't "do it without looking" — in quotes as I direct manipulation to hit a well known screen target requires looking but is basically subconscious. A guess another one is saving text out of an image to share later. I use mis-use Evernote as a queue of interesting things to share with my family, and what with people posting screenshots to the web rather than typing, I use Screenotate to undo the process. So the complex action is: • See the image worth extracting text to share from. • Type command+shift+0 to enter Screenotate screenshotting mode. • Track over to the upper left corner of interesting text. • Drag to lower right corner of interesting text. • Click on Evernote elephant at top of screen. • Wait for Screenotate OCR to finish. I just have a feel for how long it takes. • Command+V to paste the OCRed text. • Click the Evernote "Convert to Note" button. So eight steps that are basically a continuous gesture.

All the most complex compound actions I can perform on autopilot are in the context of sport. For example, the sequence of hip throw/mount/armlock in judo/jiujitsu, which is considerably more multidimensional than anything I do at a keyboard. My suspicion is that gamers develop similar flows that put anything our development platforms facilitate to shame.

Doing some complex sequence of edits with keyboard shortcuts. With any code editor, but it is with vi(m) that the flow was the smoother. Also with other kind of software that provide powerful shortcuts.

vim and games are the two places i get this way. for a short time in college when i was doing a lot of research i developed a sort of algebra for BetterTouchTools shortcuts that served me really well (eg four fingers = spaces 3 fingers = windows etc). really advanced excel users can be wild to watch

At the start of my career, I committed to muscle memory the sequence of keyboard keys to navigate from windows-start through the submenus, and select the right command. Until one day a coworker finally picked up on this and said, "You know you can just press [Windows key]+L?" ... Good to know!

From a toy/game/tangible media perspective, the Rubik cube can be very intuitive once you've learnt the algorithms. It's also a blend of muscle memory, memorising, intuition and learning.