Are there short-cuts for these common tasks?

Question

hello --
i am a professional UX/UI designer, who recently switched from Illustrator as my preferred tool to Photoshop. while i loved the ability to have multiple canvases in Illustrator, the general quality on a pixel level rendering is far superior in Photoshop. In addition, my clients generally are not able to use .ai files. so far migrating has been a good experience and i am happy with it. however, i do find myself frequently repeating a few tasks for which i wonder if there are any short-cuts, work-arounds, or i am just plain missing something. any help will be much appreciated:
generally i find that PS gets very slow when the files is somewhat large (~255MB right now). i do use many layer effects in general, so that might be the issue. but when i nudge a folder or group of items i frequently get a progress indicator. i have all teh performace settings at its ideal and allocated 70% of the 8GB i have in my machine. Still it becomes unusable, when i have upwards 10-15 screens to work with.
Is it possible to assign a gradient to a vector mask, in order to achieve partial transparency? for a layer mask, no problem, but what about vector masks? can i asign a gradient overlay effect to a mask instead of drawing it by hand?
when i do a transformation on a vector shape, the default always seems to be % instead of px, it also defaults to the center orientation point, and height & width are not linked. is there a way to either set this as a preference, or a keyboard shortcut, instead of having to click everytime?
The font smoothing always defaults to "sharp" while i prefer using "crisp" can this be set globally?
is using the position & layer style checkbox in layer comps useful to you guys who might be in the same line of work? so far i find it easier to create new folder for each state, but realize it may cause the slowness i refer to in #1
this is a big one: when i copy layer effects and shape attributes, it seems like there is no simple short-cut command for it. so i end up doing 2 copy & paste operations each time. is there a way ideally to select a shape and then copy & paste both values at the same time?
another big one: i often duplicate a layer or a folder, but then need to move it into a different folder. i fondmyself dragging it all the way around the palette, which is a big hassle. is there a way to just copy & paste a layer into the right position?
i minor nuisance: whenever i duplicate a layer, PS adds the label "copy" to that new layer. i feel it is unnecessary and in the end my file gets somewhat meaningless through it. is there a way to avoid this or have you guys found a better way in doing this?
i know this is quite a lot, but might be also helpful to others. i would greatly appreciate your thoughts & help on those.
thank you in advance,
patrick.

Answer 1

Patrick Jean wrote:
this is a big one: when i copy layer effects and shape attributes, it seems like there is no simple short-cut command for it. so i end up doing 2 copy & paste operations each time. is there a way ideally to select a shape and then copy & paste both values at the same time?
Not sure I fully understand what you're doing now, but here's what I do:
1.  I right-click on the layer I want to copy effects from and choose Copy Layer Style.
2.  Then I left click and Control-left click on all the layers I want to paste the style to, then right-click on any of them and choose Paste Layer Style.
Is that what you were talking about re doing 2 operations?
Note that if you have styles you use over again a lot, you can create a preset.  You access those by double clicking a layer, then clicking on the Styles heading at the upper-left.
-Noel