Do you actually need to learn KiCad shortcuts, or are menus fine?

I'm firmly in the point and click camp, and I've stopped feeling bad about it. I've been doing board work for about eight years, mostly two layer stuff for hobby projects and the occasional work prototype, maybe six or eight designs a year. I know maybe five or six shortcuts and that's it. Rotate, undo, switch layers, route. Everything else I do with the mouse and it's fine. Here's the thing I figured out after trying one of those keyboard-first workflows: my bottleneck was never menu clicking. It was thinking. Deciding where the decoupling caps go, staring at the ratlines, rethinking a trace I routed ten minutes ago. Shaving half a second off placing a via did nothing for me when I spend twenty minutes just looking at the board. Where shortcuts did pay off for me was the repetitive stuff. When you're moving forty resistors or running the same operation over and over, one or two well-chosen keys add up. But learning twenty at once was a losing bet for me too. I forgot most of them within days. My rule now is I only adopt a shortcut when I catch myself doing the same clicky thing for the fifth time in a session. That way the ones I keep are the ones I actually use, and they stick naturally. If your layouts get done on time, the videos can keep thier wizardry.

I'm probably on the other end of this. I do contract board work full time, so KiCad is open on my monitor maybe thirty hours a week, and my hands basically live on the keyboard while routing. V to place a via, / to switch layers, that sort of thing. But here's what I'd tell anyone doing a few projects a year: I didn't sit down and memorize any of it. Every shortcut I know showed up because I was repeating the same action hundreds of times in one session and got sick of the mouse trip. The muscle memory only sticks when the repetition forces it to.

So when I tried learning a batch of shortcuts on purpose, same as you, I lost most of them within a month. The ones that survived were the ones my daily work kept feeding. If you only layout a board every couple of months, that reinforcement just isn't there, and that's fine. The time you'd spend drilling key combos would probably never pay itself back.

One middle ground that worked for me: KiCad shows the shortcut right on the menu item, so I'd glance down, notice the same command had a key, and pick it up that way over weeks. Zero study effort. The three or four actions that dominate your time will teach themselves eventually, and the long tail of commands isn't worth chasing at your pace.

I came here wondering the same thing. I mostly do Arduino-type shields and simple stuff, maybe two boards a year, and I just redesigned my workflow around the mouse after trying a shortcut list I found online. What I noticed is the ones that stuck are the boring ones, like m to move and e to edit a footprint. Everything else I forgot within days. My slightly diffrent problem is I barely touch KiCad for months between projects, so even the few I learn half fade. Does anyone else find they basially relearn the tool each time they open it? Feels like that might matter more than how many hotkeys I know.

Honestly the thing nobody's saying is that half those tutorial hotkeys are personal macros or custom bindings anyway. I watched one where the guy hit three keys to do somthing KiCad does by default with one click. I'd rather be fast at reading the board than fast at pressing buttons. My only real habit is right-clicking to see the context menu, which basically teaches you the shortcuts for free since they're listed right there next to each action. Pick up the ones you notice there and you're golden.

What I've noticed after years of this is that the shortcut set that actually matters depends on which tool you're in, and KiCad is kind of odd because some of its most useful ones are hidden behind commands you'd never guess. The one that changed things for me was realizing you can type a letter while a footprint is selected and get an action, instead of hunting through the right-click menu, but I'd never have found that without accidentally reading the status bar. My question is whether the tutorial people are mostly doing dense boards where placement speed compounds, because my projects are small enough that thinking time dominates anyway.

I'd push back a bit on the 'my bottleneck was thinking' arguement. When I sat down and actually timed myself on a recent four layer board, the busywork added up to hours. Dropping fifty vias one at a time, redoing a whole bus after a mistake, cleaning up silkscreen overlaps. Those little delays compound. Thinking time doesn't shrink just because you're slow at the clicking either. Both can be true, but the repetitive stuff is where I actually lost my evenings, and that's exactly what shortcuts fix.