Since we’re talking about Windows:
WinKey + .
to open up the secret emoji/symbols toolbox. 🫛
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.
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.
I discovered this at work when I fat fingered Winkey + L. No work was done that day.
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.
Which annoyingly only has a small subset of the emojis, making me have to use seach anyway.
Better than nothing I guess.
vim enters the chat
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.
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! 😩
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.
In highschool I blew my HTML teacher’s mind when I showed her this. She had been manually resizing windows for years.
This is what I do. Without looking it up, I have a whisper of a thought that win + arrow is used to, like, rotate the screen or switch monitors or something…
Just enabling Dark Mode in MS Office apps makes me god emperor of technology at work.
