Getting the most out of Win+R tutorial (Win XP 32-bits edition, but should work on plenty other versions):
= Making a folder instead of clogging up system32 or something:
- Make a folder called 'Shortcuts' or similar in a place you can easily find, like "C:\Shortcuts\".
- Right-click My Computer -> click 'Properties'.
- Select the 'Advanced' tab.
- Click 'Environment Variables'.
- In either the User variables (top) or the System variables (bottom) list, there should be an entry called "PATH" or "Path" or with other capitals (or lack thereof). Select it, and press 'Edit'.
- Move to the end, if there isn't a ';' (semicolon?) at the end add one, then append the folder location of the 'Shortcuts' folder (in this case: C:\Shortcuts\).
- Press OK on all the 3 screens that should now be open to finish it.
= Getting to the good stuff:
- Go to C:\Program Files\osu!\, right-click the 'Songs' folder, and click 'Create Shortcut'.
- Rename the shortcut to something short, like 'oss' (OSu Songs).
- Cut (not copy) the folder.
- Go to C:\Shortcuts\, and paste the folder.
- (If you want, you can close the explorer window currently pointing to C:\Shortcuts\ now.)
= Magic!
- Now press the 'Windows' button (between Ctrl and Alt? it should be there on nearly all new keyboards that aren't for Macs =P) and R at the same time to open 'Run...' (also available from the Start menu, btw), type 'oss' (you shouldn't have to refocus, so no mouse movement needed), and hit 'Enter'. That's Win+R+O+S+S+Enter = 6 keystrokes with no touching the mouse required at all, and you should have your songs folder opened. Good/fast enough for you?
If you're really cool, you now add 'osu' (a shortcut to the osu exe) to the same folder, and perhaps one to other frequently visited programs / folders / files. If you get lost in the huge amount of crap on your desktop, this is the time to fix that.
= Misc tips:
- Short names for the shortcuts = less keystrokes. 2-4 is recommended, TLA's are obviously still the best.
- Common abbreviations, like PS for PhotoShop, work really well for remembering the 'keycode' for programs you might not use often, and thus might forget otherwise.
- If you'd want, you could also move programs or files into the Shortcuts folder instead of shortcuts to them. I'd advise against it though, because it'd clog up the folder, and most important files are part of a group that should stay together elsewhere anyway.
- You can skip the first step, "Making a folder...", and instead move shortcuts into the folders already in the Path variable. There is no harm done in adding a folder to the Path, however, and it is far cleaner to not mess around in the system folders, so I strongly advise you to not skip it. I believe you can even delete the folder without editing the Path variable and still don't get any problems, but don't trust me on this.
- You can, as should be obvious from the previous misc tip, also use Run... to run any file, including programs and shortcuts, in folders like system32. Some nice ones are 'notepad', 'sndvol32' (sound volume settings), 'sndrec32' (unless mistaken, the basic sound recording program) and 'calc' (calculator).
- Yes, you can select 'Run...' from the Start menu with your mouse instead of using the Win+R key combination. But why would you, if you've got to move your hands to the keyboard to type the keycode afterwards anyway?
- Some things I like to create shortcuts for: IE (internet exploder, sadly some website devs still don't understand what 'cross-browser compatibility' means), games (wc3 or better yet tft, osu, pretty much anything has a nice well-known abbreviation you could use anyway), my anime folder (ani, or something similar), music folder (mu or mus), WA (WinAmp), SV (sndvol32, because I'm lazy and the sys-tray icon sometimes disappears on my laptop), and folders for specific classes I have that semester at university (dm for 'datamining', inp for 'internet programming', etc.).
Hope this helps. It seems long, but it isn't, and in the end saves you a lot of time if you keep adding new shortcuts.