by Kam-Hung Soh (kamhung dot soh at gmail dot com) 2007/08/04 17:57:47
Handy keyboard shortcuts for the Firefox / Mozilla browser in Windows:
Hit Alt+Space to display the Windows management menu. Hit Escape to exit this mode or Enter when you have finished ajusting your window.
Switch between applications using these Windows 3.1 shortcut: Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab. You can also switch between applications after you have started a drag-and-drop action with the pointer.
Show the Task Manager using Ctrl+Shift+Esc.
You can launch applications by entering the application name in the Windows Run dialog. Windows displays this dialog when you type Windows+R. Note: some Dell notebooks don't have a Windows logo key!
If the application installer did not add the application path to the Run dialog, you can add the application by add a new key to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ App Paths Registry key and editing its (Default) value to have the path to your application.
The rules for making an application available in the Run dialog are:
If there is an error in the key value, the Run dialog displays the following unhelpful error message: Cannot find the file 'test' (or one of its components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are unavailable.
Handy control panel applets:
Windows maintains a list of recently used programs and provides an autocompletion list. Sometimes, the autocompletion list has wrong or obsolete values because you previously typed in a wrong program option or browsed a drive that is no longer available. For instance, I didn't realise until later that the Run dialog did not support application arguments but since I had already entered a valid command name, the autocompletion list would always show that command and its argument. The autocompletion list can be modified by editing this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU.
Add keyboard shortcuts for application or document icons on the desktop by entering a letter in its Shortcut key property. You can open the application or document by entering Ctrl+Alt+key. Limitations of these shortcuts are:
Useful but lesser known keyboard shortcuts for the Windows command shell.
To redirect error and standard stream of a program to a file, use the following in Windows cmd shell: prog args > file.log 2>&1. Error stream is "2" and standard stream is "1", so the last phrase roughly means "tie stream 2 with stream 1".
When path completion is enabled in the Windows command shell, the default keystrokes to activate it are Ctrl+D and Ctrl+F to expand directory and file names, respectively. To use TAB to activate path completion, set the following registry entry to 9 (ASCII TAB): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\CompletionChar. This change takes effect when a new command shell is started.
You can start Windows Help (in Windows XP, it has the more pompous title Help and Support Center
) by typing Windows+F1. To find keyboard shortcuts, enter keyboard shortcuts overview in the Search field to obtain a list of standard keyboard shortcuts.
Compared to Windows XP, Vista requires different keystroke to move the selector to the Programs menu. In XP, you just type Windows-P then the selector is in the list of programs. In Vista you type Windows then Up+Right to move the selector to the list of programs. Another difference is that in XP, you could shut down your computer by typing Windows+U+Enter. Now you type Windows+Left+Right+U.
There's a different (and better way for touch typists) to launch a program using the Search field. First you have to configure the Start Menu:
With this change …
Asus notebooks are shipped with the ATI Catalyst Control Center application which allows you to change your display's properties. One sort-of useful feature is to turn the display 90° or 270° to read portrait formatted on-line documents without having to scroll up and down to see the whole page at once. To define hotkeys to turn the display …
| Action | Hotkey |
|---|---|
| Rotate 'Display with cursor' to Right (90° cw) | Ctrl+Alt+Right |
| Rotate 'Display with cursor' to Left (90° ccw) | Ctrl+Alt+Left |
| Rotate 'Display with cursor' to Standard Landscape (0°) | Ctrl+Alt+Up |
You should define one hotkey to restore the display back to standard landscape because the Rotate actions don't form a cycle; in other words, turning the display 90° four times does not return the display to standard landscape.
If you turn the display, the cursor's (or mouse pointer's) orientation is also turned by the same degree. So, if you turn the display clockwise 90°, moving the mouse up will move the pointer left, moving the mouse right will move the pointer up, etc.