Since we’re talking about Windows:
WinKey+.to open up the secret emoji/symbols toolbox. 🫛
It does the same thing on KDE Plasma!
Yes! Someone saw me add 😎 to a document I was grading once and it blew their mind. “Wait! What did you just do? How did you get that menu?” I try to teach people, but they almost never remember. They praise me for my navigation skills, but they don’t care to learn basic stuff like alt+tab/shift+alt+tab/win+tab.
I usually don’t use alt+tab, but alt+shift+tab is a new one for me, thanks!
Fun thing about the switch apps forward/backwards keys is shifted tab is back tab, so alt+tab is switch forward and alt+back tab is switch backwards
So useful when switching back and forth between two programs
I feel like shortcut knowledge is more about willingness to explore the machine than generations. I’m gen X.
Fun thing about the switch apps forward/backwards keys is shifted tab is back tab, so alt+tab is switch forward and alt+back tab is switch backwards
I’m a regular Windows and Linux user, but am using OSX for a work project. I can’t figure out the windows switching shortcut keys there. (This is from memory since I’m not on OSX right now) Command-Tab switches between Applications, but not separate instances of applications. Anyone know the shortcut key for that one or if there is a separate key combo to mimic Windows or Gnome?
Which annoyingly only has a small subset of the emojis, making me have to use seach anyway.
Better than nothing I guess.Also it used to lag like crazy, idk if it still does.
I discovered this at work when I fat fingered Winkey + L. No work was done that day.
That’s my most used shortcut at work.
I’ll have to try that, but I’ve been using
Win+;. It opens an emoji picker and puts the focus in a search field so you can type “shrug” or something and often just hit Enter to choose the single result.It’s ; as in ;)
At least, thats how I like to think of it.
It’s the same. The windows shortcuts page has
Windows Key + Period (.) or Semicolon (;) - Open emoji panel.
Typing
(windows)in Teams helpfully replaces the word with a dinosaur 🦖 icon.
Oh shit there’s a shortcut to do that? I’ve just been dragging one window to the side and then clicking the other when the thingy pops up, like some kind of caveman! 😩
I don’t feel like that method is inferior, it’s just different. Especially depending on the kind of work you’re doing, keyboard or mouse may feel more efficient.
That’s a reverse keyboard shortcut.
Here’s another one: When you have multiple windows open, grab one by the title bar with a click-and-hold and shake it around with your mouse. This will cause all your open windows except the one you grabbed to minimize.
I don’t know how the fuck anyone is meant to discover that naturally, or what would possess anyone to even try. I think someone at Microsoft just put it in there as a joke, so people can incessantly post this exact same “did you know this thing about Windows???” thing on the internet constantly.
In other news, double clicking the window menu (in the upper left, aka the “staple box”, which later became the mini-icon in Windows 95 and later) to this very day is a shortcut to close a window that nobody who isn’t old enough to remember what 5.25" floppy disks looked like will know about. This is a holdover from, I believe, Windows 2.0. But it still works in modern Windows to this very day.
I have to disable the shake gesture on machines that I regularly use because I often trigger it by accident. I don’t even know how, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
Man just wait till you see what you can do with Win+Tab.
It’s like alt+tab but worse!
And Win+V
Same! And I’m a millennial.
In highschool I blew my HTML teacher’s mind when I showed her this. She had been manually resizing windows for years.
To be fair, window snapping in Windows is a rather recent feature. I think it was introduced in Windows 7.
This is what I do. Without looking it up, I have a whisper of a thought that
win + arrowis used to, like, rotate the screen or switch monitors or something…CTRL + ALT + {ARROW}rotates the screenI cant seem to get that one to work, but ctrl + win + arrows changes the active desktop and minimizes all windows.
Sometimes it’s something simple like CTRL-C, then CTRL-V and the person watching you is like: wait how did you do that?!
You joke.
I had a hardcore boomer who worked mainframes - he was a mainframe wizard - refuse a redundancy payment (at age 60 - would have been a year plus wages). He was told if he didn’t take it, he would be moved to a team elsewhere. He shows up in my team and I had to teach him how to do copy paste. Then the shortcuts blew his mind.
He still used a pen and paper to change passwords (kept a small pile of them on his desk, and none were labeled but that’s another story).
You joke.
I highly doubt that was a joke. It is unsettlingly common among even those who use computers daily.
And then you absolutely blow their fucking mins with WIN+V
I’ve been a Linux user for so long. Clipboard history was a thing almost two decades before Windows got it. I don’t think it is coded to Win+V though – CTRL-ALT-V is what my muscle memory is telling me…
Middle mouse button paste is the bees knees though ;)
Well, depends on the clipboard manager or desktop environment what the default shortcut is. On KDE, it is Win+V.
Ctrl+alt+V for Linux? Which distro?
I just switched to Mint and have been trying to find a way to do clipboard history on mine lol
I presumed KDE Plasma. But there is so many variations among linux desktops and distros :)
I have to use Windows computers from time to time. It’s so frustrating to middle click and nothing happens
Haha I remember someone at a front desk grumbling about how they couldn’t find the clock, and without looking at their screen I asked them to press F11. The way they looked at me when that solved it was priceless.
For the absolute longest time (at least from Windows 95 through Windows 7, perhaps even later version but I dunno on that), every now and then after you exit a game, you can’t properly drag and drop nor double click anything on the desktop.
Eventually I found a particular game that would consistently cause this issue, which got me wondering what all the game was doing upon exit. I theorized that maybe it left the keyboard buffer in something of a goofy state.
So, I started with the thought that Windows must be thinking that a key is still being held down when it wasn’t. And sure enough, just tapping the Esc key managed to refresh the keyboard buffer and resolve the issue.
You should easily be able to see the effects of this bug manually by holding down Esc and trying to use the mouse, stuff just ain’t gonna work right. So if you ever happen to encounter this bug, just tap the Esc key to refresh the keyboard buffer.
fun fact: old school command-line users know all about keyboard shortcuts and we love them. We just never became managers, because fuck that.
Shift insert
Cd…
cd…s nuts
Its cd … Not cd…
I’m on mobile and am sure I wrote it like that but android tends to try to take away the spaces. Like. This. Yeah
When’s I hit cd SPACE period period it takes away the space.
So yeah thanks for noting kids would’ve got misinfo
Windows has an alias for this one by default, and I’ve been using it for so long that I’ve also set it up on my Linuxes
Windows users: Press ctrl + alt + shift + windows key + L. Go on, try it.
You’re welcome. You can never unlearn this knowledge now.
I’m on linux, please just say what this does.
If you’re on Linux, you really should be knowledgeable enough to use a search engine.
I'll save you the trouble this time.
(It opens LinkedIn in the default web browser.)
There’s nothing wrong with asking easily searchable questions in threads. Either one person can ask and one person can answer or EVERYONE can search it on their own.
Yup! Also we’re on social media - may as well be social with eachother.
Oh, I thought this was asocial media been over here avoiding people n shit…
This is so fucking dumb that I had to look it up anyways, to be sure you’re not joking. Turns out, it is true.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2070843/behold-the-dumbest-windows-shortcut-of-them-all.html
Holy fuck, that’s criminally stupid.
I am rustled by this comment more than I should be.
Fuck that noise
sfgsdgdsgdsgdsgdfs
I haven’t ever uses D LinkedIn, and I never will.
When I used to sell tickets on the railway, I noticed that the ticketing programme had underlined letters, so I tried doing alt + those letters and it worked. I spent an evening shift at a remote outstation getting to grips with the shortcuts, then when it came to doing the morning rush at a busier station, it was talk of the town.
I worked at a call centre for a shopping channel years ago, at a time when they were trying to get everyone to ditch this DOS-based ordering programme where you mainly use the F keys for operations in favour of this user-friendly GUI where you could do everything with the mouse, and would you believe, people were routinely faster with the keyboard. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to them that anyone can get used to doing keyboard controls if they’re sat at a computer eight hours a day.
Just enabling Dark Mode in MS Office apps makes me god emperor of technology at work.
vim enters the chat
We don’t negotiate with terrorists here
I’ve been stuck in vim for 10 years, it WONT LET ME LEAVE!!
Surprised top comment isn’t “just install linux”
Millennials trying to act like Gen Xers don’t know shortcuts? Whatever.
More that Gen X doesn’t exist; it seems to go Boomers, Millenials, Gen Z
Gen X, the real Silent Generation. So silent that nobody notices us sneaking past, ensuring a smooth transition from the analog age to digital.
Ikr? We were learning keyboard based commands because mice weren’t a thing at the time. Even filthy casuals picked up some over the decades
I remember those WordPerfect paper templates you’d put over the keyboard to list all the shortcuts.
Lotus 1-2-3
no it’s the normal erasure of gen x from the timeline
The timeline goes
Old dead boomers
Dying wealthy boomers
Young poor boomers
Gen y
Millennials
Gen z
Gen alpha
Gen Y = millennials
The normal erasure of Millennial Falcons from the timeline?
Blame boomers. Millennials is their catchall term for whatever generation they’re complaining about regardless if it’s Millennials, Gen X, Z, Alpha, etc.
At the same time, I feel anyone under 25 describes anyone over 25 as boomer, so that ain’t helping either lol.
There are users from all generations who don’t know shortcuts. There are also users from all generations who do know shortcuts. In my experience, gen X/Y are more likely than other generations to know shortcuts. With that said, I still come across far more gen X who don’t know any than gen Y.
Though this all may be culture/region dependent.
Em… Well…
The fact that Windows still doesn’t have a shortcut to move windows between Virtual Desktops is mind boggling to me. I had to download an AHK script just to replicate basic features included in KDE, Gnome and probably most of the tiling WMs.
Ctrl+Win+[Left or Right Arrow]
(Edit: misread the comment, shortcut is still valid for moving focus between virtual desktops)
That seems to move your focus to the separate group of open programs rather than moving your focused program to the separate group which is how I read the request, but that’s one I’ve been offhandedly wondering about but too lazy to look up, so thank you.
That shortcut simply switches which virtual desktop is currently active and showing onscreen. What they mean is there is no shortcut to take the active window (in the active virtual desktop) and move that window into the next virtual desktop.
To be fair, windows literally didn’t have virtual desktops until a version or two ago. Which is mind boggling given Linux had it in the 90s
It also didn’t have tabs in the file explorer for the longest time. I remember having to download some random exe from a dodgy site just to have them in W7
MS software also doesn’t play nice with virtual desktops. Opening excel files or answering teams calls yanks you all over your workflow.
Alas, working an Excel job in a non-tech field, I fear I will suffer Windows the rest of my working life ☠️
Ctrl + v, ctrl + z, shift + ctrl + v
What does shift + ctrl + v do?
Pastes without formatting.
Unless you have teams as the forefront app, then it makes a teams call to the group you are chatting with and you hate the programers who figured Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, Project, PowerPoint…should all do that and teams should be different
sfgsdgdsgdsgdsgdfs
Ctrl Y is the opposite of z, undo/redo
Unless it’s not and redo is ctrl+shift+z and ctrl+y is cut line and all editing history is lost. 😭
I showed an extension that lets you do the same on a Mac to a non-technical friend of mine who works in marketing and he was like “wow I can’t believe it works” like it was the second coming or something, one day I’ll have to tell him about i3wm and tmux and vim…
This is actually built-in on macos now
https://www.theverge.com/24273664/apple-macos-sequoia-windows-snap-how-to
Hyprland/sway or any other WM-user: Pathetic
I’ve made a couple abortive attempts at sway and others, but can’t seem to find anything that “just works” like i3. Is it really worth switching?
Sway to i3 is near the same, difference is Xorg vs. Wayland.
Hyprland is worth switching but that’s just my opinion.
I’m the Hackerman of my workplace by using shift+tab to jump one cell to the left in Excel.
tab --> cell to the right ist selected (next cell)
shift+tab --> cell to the left is selected (previous cell)
This is a standard shortcut and works most places where Tab works. Forms, buttons, etc.
Web browsers.
I did not know that. I thought it was Excel exclusively. But many people who use Excel don’t seem to know of this shortcut.
Mate… a ton of people think Excel is the “Checkered Word” and use it to write letters.
Others send me tables in a Word document… Dunno which I hate more.
Who art thou prometheus that steals this knowledge from the gods to deliver it on to us mortals?
