The darktable shortcut system has revolutionized my editing. I came from Capture One, where you can hold down a key while dragging your mouse, to change some sliders.
I could replicate the same thing in darktable, e.g. E + mouse changes exposure (I use move instead of drag, which is even better). But I also map Shift-E-move to do fine changes, double-tap-E to reset to defaults, and single-tap-E to “edit”, i.e. open the floating exposure editor. It is highly useful to me that a single key can do these multiple, related things.
I use other shortcuts to enable/disable modules, such as local contrast. Some modules I’ve set up with a default-zero blend strength, and the shortcut changes the blend strength instead of the module slider itself (e.g. the blend strength of a clarity preset in the Contrast EQ).
Some other shortcuts just activate specific modules, like cropping or retouch. Some others activate pickers, like the color balance white point.
It took me a second to understand how to create shortcuts. Double clicking the entry in the big table is a bit clunky. But the shortcut picker helped tremendously with that. It’s also a bit cumbersome that you need to remove some shortcuts (by setting them explicitly to no-action) before you can rebind them. But these are not hard to understand, just non-obvious to discover.
Overall, this allows me to edit most (ordinary) photos with one hand on the keyboard, and one on the touchpad, without interacting with any sliders directly. This very quickly became second nature to me: When I want to increase brightness, I no longer think “go to the basic tab, then search for the exposure module, click to expand, then pinpoint the slider head, then drag to change exposure”. Instead I just think “make image brighter”, and my hands do their thing. Can you tell I used to be a heavily customized Emacs user?
At this point, I’m thus much faster in darktable than I’ve ever been in Capture One or Lightroom (despite LrSuperKeys). Also, there’s great satisfaction in not just using a tool, but making it mine in some small way.