10 Keyboard shortcuts keys that you should know.

Introduction

A shortcut definition according to WordWeb dictionary is “A router shorter than the usual one”, even the definition is short. Most people who don’t use computers that often don’t know about these 10 keyboard shortcuts keys. An average user knows some of these 10 keyboard shortcuts keys but they rarely use them. I don’t think they really see the power of keyboard shortcuts keys. So you may ask yourself why do you need to take shortcuts?

Well as the definition says it, is to get things done with great efficiency and most importantly what happens if your mouse starts giving you troubles and eventually stops functioning? Are you going to wait until you get the new mouse? So while you wait what happens with that big unsaved project you’ve been working on? Are you willing to lose it all and start afresh when you get the new mouse? Well I don’t think so. Enough with the whole lecture and advice let’s just get straight into how we are going to solve the above problems with these 10 keyboard shortcuts keys that you’ll likely use on your daily computer activities.

Let’s get started, I assume you are using Microsoft Windows but anyway these keyboard keys work almost the same with Linux operating system but for Mac OS they may differ you may consider using Command key instead of Ctrl.

1. Ctrl + Shift + N ( + + N )

The above combination keys are going to create a new folder on your desktop,

so let’s create 3 new folders and name them “shortcut”, “shortcut2” and “shortcut3” or anything of your interest.

Bonus

The next thing you need to do is to navigate using Arrow Keys to the shortcut folder once it’s highlighted with a dotted line then press Enter. It should open that folder then you’ll see that it’s an empty folder, fine here is our next step…

Right click (click the right button of your mouse) inside the shortcut folder, you’ll see a dialog box press W in your keyboard then press T, a new text file is created right, name the file anything you like then create the second one.

2. Ctrl + A

Next let select all those text files in that folder, when done you should see highlighted text files.

3. Ctrl + C

Let’s copy those text files.

4. Alt + F4 ( + F4)

Close this folder so we can move to our next keys but one more thing before we move on. Just want to address this, you can use the above combination keys to shut down the computer. So what is going to happen is the computer will shut down all opened programs first then when it’s done it’s going to pop a dialog box asking you if you really want to shut down the computer.

5. Ctrl + V

Navigate with Arrow Keys to “Shortcut2” folder and once again press enter once it’s highlighted you’ll notice that it’s an empty folder. Press the above combination keys and you’ll notice that you just pasted the files to our “Shortcut2” folder, I hope you are still following.

6. Ctrl + X

The above keyboard shortcut keys I’ll leave to you as homework but to give you a hint of what is happening you can substitute NO.3 with the above keyboard shortcut keys.

7. Shift + Delete vs Delete

Now navigate to our first Shortcut folder then press delete, obviously you expected that one to happen but see what happens, it’s not permanently deleted it is still there in your recycle bin. Sometimes you want to delete a file permanently to save space, “well the file it’s not even that big” but anyway Shift + Delete will delete the file permanently but be cautioned though only do this when you really want the file out of your computer.

8. Windows + program(e.g. 2) ( + 1)

Let me explain how these combination keys work before we can move on, first press the Windows key then the second key must be a number, so you going to look at your windows taskbar and if you haven’t changed it you should start counting from Microsoft Edge that makes it the 1st program which is 1 the following application 2 and so on. So in my case I’m using Chrome and it’s number 3 in my taskbar so my combination keys should be Windows + 3 and don’t worry if you are lost or nothing is happening you can just play around with numbers but normally you going to see a search box and task view start counting after those programs.

9. Ctrl + T

Now I assume your web browser is open, it’s time to open a new tab.

10. Ctrl + W

Close the new opened tab.

11. F5 vs Ctrl + F5 (bonus)

Finally our bonus combination keys. Let’s get straight to the point, the difference between the above keys. I’ll tell you the difference, with your browser open just press F5 when done press Ctrl + F5 do you notice any difference? I know you did. I’m joking you might have noticed no difference I know but to tell you the truth something different did happen when you pressed those keys.

The first key you’ll normally use to refresh your page I think is self-explanatory, the second key very few knows or use it, you’ll normally use it when you want to hard refresh the page. I know you completely lost, now you like why would I want to do that?  Well because your web browser is designed to optimize web pages using cache to make surfing experiences as smooth as possible. So some people don’t even notice that they are viewing outdated context even if the page was updated by the owner because your browser is still referencing the old files that were saved long ago on your local storage so to get read of this you need to hard refresh the browser to clear those long stored files or catches.

Conclusion

And these were the 10 keyboard shortcuts keys that I think you should know. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did sharing this little information with you and now you can work like a geek with optimisation and if you have any question or problems just feel free to contact me on the form I’ll be happy to help. And again this was just scratching the surface. There’s a lot of keyboard shortcuts keys out there. Maybe someday I’ll write about them again.

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