Friday Five: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts
- CTRL-W (Firefox)
Closes an open tab. - CTRL-S (almost every Microsoft product)
Saves. - CTRL-SHIFT+arrow, SHIFT-END, & SHIFT-HOME (almost every text editor)
Highlights (selects) a word and / or line of text. - ALT-F4 (Windows)
Closes the current window. - ALT-SPACEBAR-X (Windows)
Maximizes the current window.
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.
Note that these are just my favorites and I’m not claiming that they’re the best ones.
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.