Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts

Friday, March 2, 2007

Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts

  1. CTRL-W (Firefox)
    Closes an open tab.
  2. CTRL-S (almost every Microsoft product)
    Saves.
  3. CTRL-SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT-END, & SHIFT-HOME (almost every text editor)
    Highlights (selects) a word and / or line of text.
  4. ALT-F4 (Windows)
    Closes the current window.
  5. ALT-SPACEBAR-X (Windows)
    Maximizes the current window.

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Bob Myers 03.02.07 at 10:25 pm

A semi-weak best five list, but I know you’re focused on the big run on Sunday. CTRL-W is far from being a mere Firefox tab-closing shortcut; it’s pretty much a standard “CLOSE” menu equivalent going back several decades, probably originating in the Macintosh’s Cmd-W to close current document, then stolen by Windows.

As long as you’re going to list CTRL-S, you might as well list CTRL-Z for Undo, a shortcut George does not seem to know, since I notice him reaching for the mouse to hit the little curly arrow little Undo icon on the toolbar whenever he wants to undo something, which is quite often.

2 dvg 03.02.07 at 11:12 pm

Note that these are just my favorites and I’m not claiming that they’re the best ones.

3 Steve 03.04.07 at 4:58 am

Finding ways like keyboard shortcuts or hot keys to do repetitive tasks more efficiently is just awesome. I have always dreaded learning application-specific shortcuts, but I find myself motivated in learning any methods that reduce the number of steps used to accomplish a task that is repeated continually.

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