this popped up in twitter for me this week. hadn’t seen it before.
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Indeed – it’s darn near a necessity! For the keyboard warriors out there, Join is directly accessible once you have selected the objects to be joined:
Mac: ⌘ Cmd + J
Win: Ctrl+ J
You can also Average and Join in a single step:
Mac: ⌘ Cmd +⌥ Opt + ⇧ Shift + J
Win: Ctrl + Alt + Shift + J
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If I can shamelessly plug one of my videos (not for everyone – I accept that 40 minutes of slow-talking instruction makes a lot of people want to throw YouTube out the window), I cover this and some other cleanup techniques in Fixing Artwork Glitches with Adobe Illustrator for Laser Cutting - YouTube
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I didn’t know you can average a join. I’ve spent hours zoomed way in trying to join corners. Thanks for this info!
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And if you are an Inkscape aficionado, Shift+J will average Join two anchor nodes. You can also select a messy bunch of anchor nodes, such as 5 all right next to each other on a path, use the same keyboard short cut and get one averaged anchor node out of it!
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That will be quite useful! Thanks!
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You may also enjoy turning on “snap to point” 
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Haha-I’ve been using that trick for years! The only thing is, you have to make sure you only select the end anchor points. If you happen to have another point very close to the anchor point and you do an area select to grab the anchor points, you’ll get an error message (that one has tripped me up many times).
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What!!! This is AWESOME!
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The latest version joins multiple whole lines!!!
(Like all the segments you get from a CAD or box maker export)
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I use node editing in Inkscape all the time, have always wondered about keyboard shortcuts as they are not on the menu…
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Now… can someone show me where the “mind blown” clean-up button is located? I’m in need of it! This is going to be SUCH a time saver. Thank you for posting this!
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It depends on what you mean by “clean up” - “Select > Object > Stray Points” and then hitting delete gets rid of orphan anchor points, if you have too many in a path you use simplify, the potential clean ups go on and on.
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