Forget your mouse with these keyboard shortcuts [WINDOWS]
Enough time wasted to switch applications or searching with the help of the mouse. In this article let’s show ponder upon some of the shortcuts to make your life easier, facile, and painless.
According to research by Prof. Fenian at Cornell University, an average user spends 428 clicks per day. That’s an average use case. An intensive user like a gamer, text editor, graphic designer, or a developer uses much more than that, almost ~1000 clicks per day. The average office worker clicks their mouse roughly 5,000 times per day. So that’s the equivalent of…a whopping SEVEN CALORIES burned per day. That’s almost one whole baby carrot!
For comparison’s sake, a Whopper from Burger King has 670 calories and it would take about 472,000 clicks of your mouse to burn one-off. In days, that’s about 94.4 days aka 18.8 workweeks aka 4.72 months. Just in case you were wondering.
Let’s cut it short and reduce some. Let’s explore some of the windows shortcuts to save your life :p
Windows Explorer Short-Cuts
- Switching Applications
Stop switching your windows with your mouse and making an extra click effort, you can switch applications by alt+tab or win + tab keep pressing tab key until you get your destination window.
2. Quick Access to File Explorer
Fed up trying clicking computer icon on the desktop to open explorer. Here’s a quick tip, press win + E to start quick access to windows explorer.
3. Minimize, Restore, and Close a Window
Minimize, Restore or Close a window not by clicking the ugly mouse, rather there’s a hack: press alt+space and a small window will appear on the top left corner similar to underneath image with an underline alphabet.
Press the underline alphabet to perform that action.
Ex. to Restore the Window, press alt+space and then r
Minimize the window, press alt+space and then n
Close the window, press alt+space and then c
4. Jump to Desktop
Stop minimizing all the windows and press win+D to jump straight to your desktop.(alternatively, if you have Synaptics drivers installed just use a 3 finger swipe down.)
5. Create a New Multiple Desktop Window
If you open the list of recent apps there will be an option of opening a new desktop on your top left corner.
Instead, of this tedious process, Just press ctrl+win+D to add to new desktop to the workspace. You can create multiple desktops, and switch by using ctrl+win+(left/right arrow keys).
6. Check Properties of a file/folder
Just press alt+enter key combo to view the properties.
7. Jump to File Explorer address bar
Stop using the mouse to reach that address bar just press ctrl+L and windows will start highlighting the address bar. You can start typing your file path now.
8. Create your Application shortcut
You can also create your own custom shortcut for opening your favourite application. Just go to that application properties and insert your keyboard shortcut to ease your life.
9. Open Task manager
It’s a pretty familiar one but you can use ctrl + shift + esc on your keyboard.
Vs Code Shortcuts
If you are a developer you must have bumped into this thing called “Visual Studio Code” or vs code. It’s a powerful code editor with tons of features and extensions.
Let’s save some time in vs code with some shortcuts.
- Open Command Palette
Press cmd+shift+P or F1 / goto view>open command palette to open command palette.
- Terminal Shortcuts
Toggle the terminal window: ctrl+~ (tilde)
Helper Short-Cuts
- Create a new terminal: ctrl+shift+~
- Scroll up/down: ctrl+up_arrow/down_arrow
- Goto a particular line: ctrl+g
- Toggle a File in the editor: ctrl+p
- Open User settings: ctrl+,
- Toggle Full Screen: F11
- Indent/Outdent Line: ctrl+]/ctrl+[
- Jump to matching bracket: ctrl+shift+\
- Insert a line below/above: ctrl+Enter/ctrl+shift+enter
- Toggle suggestions while typing … : ctrl+spacebar
- Open source folder of the current code: ctrl+K R
Google Chrome Shortcuts
Stop browsing like a newbie and browse like a pro with these shortcuts.
- Open a new Tab
press ctrl+T to open a new tab in google chrome(others have almost same shortcuts.)
2. Open an incognito Window
Press ctrl+shift+N to open a private tab in chrome (ctrl+shift+P in Mozilla)
3. Switching between opened tabs
Press ctrl+tab to cycle between opened tabs.
4. Goto a particular tab
press ctrl+tabnumber to jump to a particular tab
ex. to open third tab press ctrl+3 and windows will switch to the third tab of chrome.
5. Close current tab
Press ctrl+W to close the current tab window
oops, you accidentally closed a wrong tab? Here’s a hack:
6. Undo a closed window
Press ctrl+shift+T and let that magic happen.
7. Jump straight to the URL bar
Stop using the mouse to reach that URL bar just press ctrl+L and chrome will start highlighting the URL address bar. Start typing the URL address now.
8. Navigate between currently opened page
Stop using the boring method to click the back/front arrow buttons on the screen to navigate between pages….
Simply press alt+leftArrow key to navigate back the currently opened page and alt+rightArrow key to navigate forward the current page.
9. Lock the Windows Screen
Someone peeping your desktop while doing something?
Just press win+L to lock the screen.
10. Life
Sorry, There’s no shortcut !!
Thank you for reading this article, I hope these shortcuts were productive and saved your time :)
