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Veronica Belmont from Tekzilla shares some fancy Facebook shortcuts for power users. Learn how to navigate all the major functions on the Facebook homepage in any browser straight from your keyboard.

Every operating system and browser combination will have a different identifier. Following are the ones you will need, depending on your configuration:

Combine your identifier with the following keys to perform the shortcuts:

• Identifier + ? moves your curser to the search box
• Identifier + m launches a compose new message window
• Identifier + 1 takes you to your home page
• Identifier + 2 launches your profile page
• Identifier + 3 opens your friend requests
• Identifier + 4 opens your messages menu
• Identifier + 5 opens your notifications menu

Using the identifier plus the numbers 6 – 0 work as well, but Veronica wants to leave something for you to discover!

I’m glad she took the time to create this tutorial. I honestly didn’t even know these particular shortcuts myself. For those who spend a lot of time on Facebook, knowing these quick maneuvers can SAVE you a lot of time. Thanks, Veronica and the Tekzilla team!

Do You Know the Secret Facebook Keyboard Shortcuts?

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Every power user uses Alt+Tab. In the case of Mac OS X, it’s Command+Tab. Inside of Windows, I knew there had to be a better way to switch between tasks. I found some freeware, that works perfectly. It’s called TaskSwitchXP. If you’re running Windows XP… you really have to use this.

TaskSwitchXP is an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched to. TaskSwitchXP also has a powerful process and window management capability that allows you quickly to close/minimize applications and their groups. The unique capabilities of TaskSwitchXP make it useful for tracking down multitudinous windows, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

You may now be asking yourself what a good equivalent is for Mac OS X? Well, let me show you. When my open programs are minimized into the Dock and I do Command+Tab… it appears to not pop up. It brings the application to the foreground, but not the window itself. I stumbled into something on accident today. If I do Command+Tab to the application I want… and then roll my thumb to the Option button… it will bring the application window up.

With a Mac, you can also try Witch. Witch enables every user to customize the interface, hot keys, and behaviors of Witch, in the system preferences. Witch is also very easy to use. After you have set-up your hot keys, you can start using Witch immediately. Witch runs in the background until you hit your designated hot key. When you do so, a small window will pop up with all of your open applications. This makes is easy to select the window or file that you would like to switch to and continue your work.

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Task Switching

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I find that my computing experience is greatly enhanced by knowing a few really good keyboard shortcuts. I think everyone should know a lot of these basic commands, as it speeds up your work, and makes life just that much easier when you don’t have to reach for the mouse, and can keep your hands on the keyboard. They may seem simple, almost basic computer knowledge, but I’m always surprised how overlooked some of these simple gems are. Between these keyboard shortcuts and a program called “Lauchy” (a command-line application launcher, much like Quicksilver for OSX) which I also suggest, I find I’m far quicker to get from point A to point B, and rarely have to use the start menu, or have icons on my desktop.

• Windows Key Yes, everyone knows how much hitting the Windows key in the middle of your full-screen game can ruin your day, but outside of playing games, it can be very useful for more than just pulling up the Start menu. Commands such as:
  • Win + D minimizing all of your windows and displaying the desktop. This can be great if you have a lot of stuff up, and just want to get it all out of the way. Hitting Win + D again will bring up your windows just as they were before you hide them all.
  • Win + R Opens the “Run…” dialog box. Great to get to the command line, or calculator quickly (typing in cmd or calc respectively) without having to go through the Start menu. It’s also good for re-lauching explorer if it bugs out for some reason. Other good ones to know are msconfig and services.smc, which are great for tweaking both system settings and running services.
  • Win + E Opens up the Explorer for “My Computer” Get to files nice and quick, especially with my next tip.
• Use your keyboard to navigate folders What? Your keyboard works to navigate folders? Holy file browsing, Batman! Give it a try. Open up your C:\ drive and hit “P” it will immediately jump to the files starting with “P” and if you keep typing, it will keep refining. “Pro” will usually highlight “Program Files” Hit enter to open the folder, and then off you go typing the next folder you want.
• Tab and Shift + Tab Tab will move you automatically to the next field within the in-focus window. What does that mean? Well, say you’re composing an e-mail. Type in the To: line as “Chris@Pirillo.com” then instead of clicking on the subject line, you can just hit “Tab” until it highlights the subject line. Type in your subject, hit tab again, and you’re in the body of the e-mail. This works great in conjunction with Win + E, as by default, Windows selects the file tree on the left, and to navigate with the keyboard, you want to have the main field selected which is on the right. Alternatively, Shift + Tab moves you to the previous field. Say you’re in that same e-mail, but you want change the subject. Hitting Shift + Tab while in the body of the e-mail will pull your cursor back up to the subject line, and select all the text in the field.
• Alt + Tab While in a window, Alt+Tab will switch between windows on the taskbar. Holding down Alt, and repeatedly hitting tab lets you select which window you want (it gives you a little pop-up on screen) Letting go of alt pulls the window up.
• Alt + F4 Closes a window. Plain and simple. It’s the keyboard’s way of hitting the X in the upper right.

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Windows Key: Keyboard Shortcuts

From Rickie Dickie, a passionate OPMLer – pointing out that grazr makes TagJag OPML much more usable on-demand:

Here’s a TagJag / grazr mashup smart bookmarklet for Firefox (right-click and add this link to your Bookmarks). Written as a smartlet – but JUST in case you don’t know what that is, you name the bookmark keyword to something like “tags” and then in the address bar type “tags gnomedex” to browse TagJag’s OPML for that keyword in grazr. I posted HTML embedding script; check out grazr’s site for particulars.

The equiv favelet (bookmarklet) for either IE or Firefox would be something like this:

[js]javascript:d=document;wgS=window.getSelection;dgS=d.getSelection();dS=d.Selection;q=(encodeURIComponent(‘%s’)==’%2525s’?”:’%s’)+(wgS?wgS():dgS?dgS():dS?dS.createRange().text:”);if (!q)q=prompt(‘Enter tag’,”);open(‘http://grazr.com/gzpanel?font=Tahoma,sans-serif&fontsize=8pt&file=http%3A//tagjag.com/all/’ + q + ‘/opml’);void(‘rickdog’)[/js]

This favelet is written to work like this:

• If nothing is selected and there is no smartlet argument on the address line, you’re prompted for a keyword
• If text is selected and there is no smartlet argument, the selected text is the keyword
• If no text is selected but there is a smartlet argument, the argument is the keyword
• If both text is selected and there’s a smartlet argument, they are combined to make a single keyword (smartlet + selected text)

I must also note the new Maxthon TagJag sidebar plugin – which is still getting tweaked. Oh, and Rickie Dickie also grazjag’ed a YubNub!

TagJag in Firefox