As a long time Visual Studio developer I had become accustomed to pressing Ctrl-Alt-L to set the focus on the Solution Explorer, and then using up/down arrows to move around.

I am spending a lot of time in the atom editor these days and my muscle memory still itches to press Ctrl-Alt-L in order to focus atom’s Tree View. So I decided to customize atom.

Customizing atom keymap

To customize the keyboard shortcuts, proceed like this:

• Use menu File → Open Your Keymap.
• Paste following snippet at the end of the file.
• Save.

'.platform-win32':
  'ctrl-alt-l': 'tree-view:toggle-focus'