Hotkeys Hot Off the Keyboard
But oh no! You’ve made a mistake, the power of hotkeys can be intoxicating, and you’ve moved too fast, what will you do? The Undo operation is there to help you save yourself and can be performed with Ctrl+Z.
In the wonderful world of the Windows Operating System there exists a time-saving feature-set many do not take advantage of. Learning common and uncommon Windows hotkeys are a large part of ascending to the status of power user. Mouse clicks can easily be inaccurate and cumbersome, and in certain contexts will not work as you expect them to. More often than not hotkeys will work in whatever application you are working in to provide you unheard of abilities. For instance, some applications disable your ability to right-click, which neuters the useful copy-paste operations. Thankfully, there are hotkeys for these operations, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V respectively. So long as you can still highlight and enter text these hotkeys will undoubtedly work in your favor. A less common, but none-the-less useful operation is Cut which can be achieved with Ctrl+X. But oh no! You’ve made a mistake, the power of hotkeys can be intoxicating, and you’ve moved too fast, what will you do? The Undo operation is there to help you save yourself and can be performed with Ctrl+Z.
Sometimes you end up in stickier situations, with multiple windows and applications open at once even powerful workstations may need additional time to think. This can result in windows freezing or hanging, the usual minimize and close buttons reduced to no more than greyed out pixels on your monitor, or worse the taskbar itself is no longer operational. Alt+Tab is one way to switch between application windows without needing the malfunctioning Graphical User Interface (GUI). You can even hold the Alt key and tap the Tab key to see miniature versions of all your windows and cycle through them to select the window you want to bring to the foreground.
Hotkeys are not just constructive though; they can be destructive as well - in a good way. Alt+F4 will close whatever the active application is on your PC, allowing you to smack down misbehaving applications, or simply close them when you are done using them. This hotkey was popularized by mischievous gamers who would suggest to their opponents in multiplayer games that Alt+F4 was the button combination they were looking for to make them unwittingly shutdown their game.
There are many, many more hotkeys to discover, some applicable across all of Windows and others specific to certain applications. When beginning to use a new application it can be helpful to lookup what its proprietary hotkeys are and then look again later once you’ve learned the application to see if there is a hotkey your arsenal may be missing. There are also ways to make your own hotkeys for launching certain applications, and keyboards that include extra keys outside of the usual suspects for mapping functions and operations to.
It can be daunting to learn and memorize a new way of doing things, but hotkeys are worth the effort. They will reduce the fumbles that often occur when point-and-clicking with the mouse cursor and speed up operations that may have otherwise been cumbersome.
-Peter T. Belies