Oh, man. I should have done this little tweak AGES ago.
So there’s this palette in Illustrator called “Pathfinder”. You can select a few paths and perform various Boolean operations on them. It used to do this as a live effect; the individual paths would remain separately editable. If you wanted it to be permanent, you could hold down alt while clicking on the Pathfinder palette’s buttons, and it would spit out one path that looked like the result. I don’t think I ever held down alt; the whole reason I love Illustrator so much is that so much stuff is constantly malleable.
A few versions back, they “fixed” the Pathfinder palette by swapping the sense of the alt key. Now the default is to make a hard-to-edit single path; you have to hold down alt to keep it editable the way I like it. No prefs switch to set it to the old behavior, either. And I found myself using the Pathfinder less and less, opting for the sloppier route of just drawing the composite shape by hand most of the time. I’d just get a little burst of annoyance every time I had to hold down alt, you know?
The other day, I recorded some actions of hitting the three Pathfinder buttons I use the most (minus front, unite, and intersect) and bound them to some f-keys. I would have bound them to more mnemonic key combos like cmd-alt-m/u/i or something, but your only options for assigning hotkeys to actions are the f-keys. And holy fuck it is so much nicer to be drawing away, then select a few paths and hit a hotkey than it is to visit a palette and snarl a little deep inside as I remember to alt-click instead of click.
I feel like I’ve just recovered that one tool that is exactly the right thing in certain situations, after having to make do by using other tools for a few years.
(And if you use Illustrator and don’t use the pathfinders much… play with them, get to know what they can do! Executing live Boolean operations on a few shapes is a great way to build shapes that really belongs in your toolbox, IMHO.)