Shortcut Roundup: NetNewsWire

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a nut for getting things done quicker through the beauty of keyboard shortcuts. I'm also a nut for NetNewsWire, and after a week of giving a few online newsreaders like Bloglines and Google Reader an honest try, I have to come back home to my comfortable, productive, plugin-able and del.icio.us-friendly NetNewsWire. Why, you ask? Well, to put it simply: it's those gosh darn productively intoxicating keyboard shortcuts.

Since I find these shortcuts so handy and since you have to dig for some of them, I figured I'd share my favorites in case anyone was wondering how to leverage the power of NNW. These shortcuts are based off a couple of assumptions: 1) You're using the regular NetNewsWire, not the Lite version; I've never used Lite, so I don't know what shortcuts and functionality are present, and 2) you have at least a group (folder) or two of feeds instead of just one big flat list:

• tab - shifts selection/focus from the feeds list to headlines to articles themselves. Handy for invoking other shortcuts.

• space bar - scrolls the present article, then selects the next unread article, not just the next one in the list

• k - marks all articles in a feed or group as read. Oddly, the shortcut for this action under the News menu is cmd k

• u - mark as unread. While k can mark an entire group as read, u will not perform the opposite on an entire group; only an individual headline. Not sure why.

• d - delete read items from a group. Handy for customized housecleaning if you have a boatload of subscriptions (I have 252) and set the preference to hold on to articles.

• b (or right arrow) - open in browser. Again, under the News menu this option is cmd b. Again, not sure why.

• . (the period key) - when a group is selected, this will expand the group

• , (the comma key) - collapsing a group

• ' (the apostrophe) - expands all groups

• ; (semicolon) - you should be able to figure out this one

• a and z - when the focus is on the subscription list, these select the previous and next subscriptions, respectively

Now you have a few more shortcuts to help breeze through your mounting pile of news subscriptions. If any NNW ninjas out there want to toss in their thoughts on handy shortcuts, fire away in the comments.