(FORTUNE Magazine) – One senses that a new front is being opened up in the great keystroke war. As the present keyboarder observed a while back, millions of personal-computer users now wage this war quite obsessively: They spend hours creating ''macros'' and other formulas enabling them to save milliseconds by avoiding keystrokes. (A macro is a command that automatically executes the equivalent of multiple keystrokes.) WordPerfect, the most popular of all the PC word-processing programs, seems to have got that way in part by being especially inventive in developing macros, said to be the secret of writer productivity. In our previous pass at this subject, we were basically derisive of the keystroke crusade, but those guys out there may be getting to us. We recently upgraded to Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.3, installed the program on our hard drive as instructed, and were then stunned to find that we now had a Lotus directory called 123R23 instead of just 123. In other words, the procedure recommended by Lotus Development Corp. mandated three extra keystrokes every time you called up the program. We glumly reinstalled 123 with its old name and politely asked Lotus whether there had been many complaints about the six- character default. They hotly denied it all, but what do you expect a PR guy to say? The latest bulletins from the keystroke wars state that some fanatics now wish to go beyond saving keystrokes; they also yearn to reduce the time it takes to stroke a key. Bill Machrone, publisher and columnist at PC Magazine, was recently kvetching over the fact that desktop PCs still have keys obliged , to travel around 4 mm (one-sixth of an inch) before hitting bottom, whereas the figure for keys in the new notebook computers is only 2 mm. Machrone says it stands to reason that requiring fingers to travel this extra distance contributes to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), a nerve ailment centered in the wrist that is widely stated to be a major menace in the workplace of the Nineties. In one of the more wonderful stats of 1991, he also reports with evident pride that he saves 40 feet of finger travel per column simply by producing his stuff on a notebook rather than on a desktop computer. How much time might an average writer save by avoiding 40 feet of finger travel? It is not an easy question to answer. For openers, many people have trouble with the 2-mm keystroke, which feels somewhat like hitting your fingertips bam bam bam on a table, so they tend to slow up. But let us nevertheless imagine that we are talking about a good typist -- 60 words a minute -- who can handle the notebook keyboard, and doesn't feel obliged to slow up. Mark Griffin of Maxi Switch, a leading keyboard producer, helpfully walked us through a calculation in which the distance saved by this typist might possibly have translated into time saved of six minutes. To a fellow brought up in the old monthly FORTUNE, where writers were often weeks and sometimes months late with their copy, keystroke manipulations continue to look like less than the whole solution to writer productivity problems.