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Windows Key: Keyboard Shortcuts

71 Responses (Add) | Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 7:25am

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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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71 Comments

Windows Vista Torrent

January 2nd, 2008
at 7:43pm

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auto typer

January 3rd, 2008
at 10:36pm

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&…</blockquote><p>Read the <a href=”http://chris.pirillo.com/2008/01/02/windows-key-keyboard-shortcuts/”>full post</a> from <a href=”http://chris.pirillo.com”>The Chris Pirillo Show</a></p><p>Tags: <a href=”http://www.blogdigger.com/tags/Windows” rel=”tag”>Windows

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January 3rd, 2008
at 12:19pm

Old standbys: Keyboard Shortcuts

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January 4th, 2008
at 11:07am

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January 4th, 2008
at 6:10am

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URZeroGravity

January 1st, 2008
at 10:48pm

omg i had the first comnment o_o

XileLord

January 1st, 2008
at 10:58pm

Windows key+Tab in vista lets you switch between windows in 3D.

Windows>Mac for gamers
Mac>Windows for everything else

However ill always use windows….i cant stand using mac. Not to mention like 75% of people use windows.

Feel free to thumbs down mac users…I’m just expressing my opinion.

therealorberon

January 2nd, 2008
at 12:10am

If I’m trying to get a notebook, should I make it a mac? it’s not for gaming and I’m a design student.

DeadFredVideo

January 2nd, 2008
at 12:16am

id say yes, try something new if you don’t like it whack windows on and your a-ok :)

tqd86

January 2nd, 2008
at 12:17am

n00b

igob8a

January 2nd, 2008
at 1:33am

If you’re a student, you’re probably better off with Windows, especially because Windows laptops are significantly cheaper than Apple’s.
I’d get a Windows machine especially if you’re planning on Windows-ing up your Mac

rhtrv1

January 2nd, 2008
at 4:46am

i agree with you, windows is better than mac for gaming, and mac is better for everything else, but my friend gave me xp on my mac and installed it with bootcamp!!!! I use that soo much

Wayne2219

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:32am

your a noob

CoffeehouseSchmuck

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:40am

YES……..I have 2 Macs and i love them

Nikiaf

January 2nd, 2008
at 9:08am

chris i think there was a typo in the email. the actual run command for services is “services.MSC” not “.smc” :)

memphisdrean

January 2nd, 2008
at 11:40am

love the top tips vids. there’s always some little tip I never knew about before. Thanks.

Ryan S. (musicmaker85)

January 2nd, 2008
at 8:35am

Keyboard shortcuts are almost a necessity for me. So long as a keyboard is a part of a computer, I could not live without them. Here are a few more keyboard shortcuts that I use on daily basis:

CTRL + C (copy)

CTRL + X (cut)

CTRL + V (paste)

CTRL + D (delete)

CTRL + A (select all)

CTRL + W (closes active window)

And the list could go on and on, but those are just a few that most may know about, but I’m sure this might be new to a few people. Keyboard shortcuts just make the whole PC experience much quicker and easier. Granted it may save only a couple of seconds, however, those seconds add up over time. Just think of how many minutes you’ve saved over the years by using keyboard shortcuts. ;-)

Ryan

bceent

January 2nd, 2008
at 8:50am

I often find myself looking at people watching people on computers, using the mouse to do every task. It looks so drawn-out and tedious, it eventually gets frustrating. Microsoft’s keyboard shortcuts help me considerably; I’m a student in the UK and use mycomputer more than 5 hours every day. The keyboard shortcuts i use the most is definately “Ctrl + C” and “Ctrl + V”, not that i copy and paste work from the internet and try to pass it off as my own!!! :) I must admit to having learnt two new shortcuts after watching your Video: “Windows + E” & “Windows + D” – i must thankyou, as these will come in much use. You may have already viewed this website: “http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449″ but if not it is a large list of microsoft’s keyboard shortcuts, which you may learn atleast one thing from :P
All the best, Ben.

bazzo1992

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:05pm

Mac are beginning to release games now for OS X so pretty soon Mac will be a perfect computer for everything.

Hunter Perrin

January 2nd, 2008
at 10:17am

If you like shortcuts, try my open source free start menu replacement. You can use the same keyboard shortcuts. It’s designed after openSUSE’s KDE menu, which is much more intuitive than the Windows start menu. It’s called Open Menu+. 100% Clean award from Softpedia. And you can’t beat free.

Cygnus

January 2nd, 2008
at 11:23am

Quick addendum to this: It’s services .MSC, not .SMC. I missed that when I proof-read my e-mail to Chris. Sorry guys!

phantomdata

January 2nd, 2008
at 11:29am

Chiming in with my own love of keyboard shortcuts. I love anything that keeps me from having to take time away from coding to reach for my mouse.

A quick contribution that I find incredibly useful (and obscure) is Alt+D in Explorer which allows you to select the address bar. I’m always manually typing in paths instead of clicking around and searching for folders, so having this at the ready always helps me in my eternal quest to not touch my mouse.

Nice to see Launchy mentioned too. The new version is really nice, including options for transparency and fade-in making it infinitely more attractive than before. Incidentally, one of the “nice” new features of Vista – the searchable start menu – is still sitting on the sidelines for me. Launchy still returns more relevant results to me faster than the start menu search.

Sean Ames

January 2nd, 2008
at 11:29am

Another exceedingly nice tip which is a great time saver is the option to (at least in Vista that I know of) configure your touchpad on a laptop to recognize what I call ‘corner taps’. These are taps on the corners of your mousepad which, instead of clicking, can be configured to perform a variety of tasks. What I’ve discovered is they work exceedingly well when you assign tasks that would normally have you scrolling to a particular corner of the mousepad to that corner- e.g., having your bottom-left hand corner configured to bring up the start menu and your top-right hand corner to close or maximize a window. Using these shortcuts when navigating via the touchpad makes it must fast than if you would actually have to scroll to the desired button and click it- and, if you ‘pair’ often used commands, such as the maximize/minimize commands, to, say, the top right and bottem left corners, you can easily and quickly pull up the windows you need.

Wes Guin

January 2nd, 2008
at 11:54am

hey chris since i’ve seen that video on keyboard shortcuts i’ve used them alot its helped me

Wireeh

January 2nd, 2008
at 7:20pm

Simple but useful tips :)

casey elkins

January 2nd, 2008
at 1:40pm

thank you so much. these are so helpful, im not going to have to use my trackpad that much anymore. thanks

JAGJIT

January 2nd, 2008
at 1:48pm

my favorite keyboard shortcuts are the macros i set up on my g-keys. i have them set up to buy in counter strike, open programs such as firefox, and type things. those are definitely my favorite, but i do like to use the ctrl shortcuts (such as CTRL+C for copy). using keyboard shortcuts is always more efficient, and easier than touching the mouse

Jdinh04

January 2nd, 2008
at 2:05pm

Thank you for the tips provider and to Chris on making this video. I use the computer throughout most of the day and normally I don’t really use shortcut keys becuase I never know how to do shortcuts. The only ones I knew were to cut and past which is Ctrl C for copy and Ctrl V for pasting. With the help of this video, I will surely be using the shortcut keys more often. Thanks again!

Jumpman

January 2nd, 2008
at 2:36pm

Wow, great tip. *Copies shortcuts into Notepad* These will surely come in handy and will be a great help.

ssolkemserB

January 2nd, 2008
at 10:56pm

Win+D Opens them in the direction the are in the taskbar…

agentBr0wn

January 2nd, 2008
at 4:04pm

These are nice. I’ve been using these for quite sometime. Another one that comes in handy for me is ctrl – shift – esc to get to task manager directly.

anthonyalvernaz

January 2nd, 2008
at 4:33pm

Nice, these reall have helped make my life easier!

Ethan

January 2nd, 2008
at 4:57pm

I could not live using a computer without shortcut keys, copy and paste are my most essentails along with cut.

ProBo

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:03pm

And don’t forget everyone favorite ctrl + alt + delete, while not really a short cut, this is super helpful when your computer freezes. Select Task manager and then click on the program thats frozen and click end task, It will force it to close and help get your computer running again

hayman12

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:08pm

Hi, I ahev been having trouble with advanced things on computers and you have helped me be better at computers and I can now teach other people!

umpc

January 2nd, 2008
at 5:13pm

Nice keyboard shortcuts this helped alot with getting stuff to open faster.

ShoofBarhoom

January 3rd, 2008
at 12:53am

OKAY. i love shortcuts but this video is ” WOW “

Blacksun1942

January 3rd, 2008
at 1:44am

It’s actually services.msc

RealityBurns

January 2nd, 2008
at 9:00pm

The keyboard shortcut I use the most is probably pressing the windows key once and then the “u” key twice. This shuts down the comp. If you hit “u” once and then hit “r” it will restart, and I think “u” then “s” will go to standby but I’m not sure because I never use that one, just he shutdown command.

Luis5589

January 2nd, 2008
at 9:12pm

thanks chris, this video is very helpful.

Gumami

January 2nd, 2008
at 10:27pm

I couldn’t live without keyboard shortcuts! Launchy is a great program, but I also like SlickRun because it allows you to create short mnemonics applications

orionsbelt0

January 2nd, 2008
at 10:34pm

hey chris short cuts are amazing and you should make a shortcut video for mac!!

Aeilegs

January 3rd, 2008
at 6:23am

You give very strange tips!

travitherabbii

January 3rd, 2008
at 12:35am

I don’t really use Keyboard Shortcuts. The only one I used is CTRL C, CTRL V but I did a few from this blog.

TalkingWhileWalking

January 3rd, 2008
at 8:38am

ROFL ^_^ Chris rules no ands if or buts about it!!!

5/5 lol

Redfish1611

January 3rd, 2008
at 5:59am

What about if you don’t have it already

Windows logo key + L = Locks the computer

Alt + F4 closes current window

and some more which i have yet to figure out lol

Best regards to Chris woo keep staying online lol

TeddGCM

January 3rd, 2008
at 6:54am

WIN-L will “lock” your computer. We use this at work whenever we are away from our computer. It puts the computer at the log on screen so you have to type your password to get back in. Of course, if you do not have a log in password set up, it’s useless.

Ross Margach

January 3rd, 2008
at 7:54am

For the good guys who are left-handed there are some very handy, and hidden short cuts in Windows. I ones I use all the time are Ctl-Insert for copy, and Shift-Insert for paste. They let me have the mouse in my left hand and do the cut and paste with the right. [Ctl-V etc. are a pain for me]. There may be other left handed shortcuts, but Microsoft stopped including them in the documentation years ago.

You also missed the most vital……… Ctl-Z for undo. [Or OH Shit!]

For Mozilla/Seamonkey users F11 for full screen [including the tabs] and Ctl+/Ctl- for font size are very handy. I don’t know if they work in Firefox or IE.

Bill

January 3rd, 2008
at 10:01am

Here are a couple more:
Win +F locks Windows XP
Win + F displays Search Result window
Win + F1 displays Help & Support Center window
Win + Pause/Break displays System Properties
Win + Tab cycles through the buttons on the task bar, press Enter to activate

Max Kantola

January 3rd, 2008
at 10:30am

Whoo! This helps soooo much. I’ve been wondering about these shortcuts.

GPA_Voltaire

January 3rd, 2008
at 11:45am

keyboard shortcuts are just about the greatest thing thats happened to computing, makes my life alot easier

richard

January 3rd, 2008
at 12:15pm

You should make a vid on some apple keyboard shortcuts. There’s a lot of them and many people don’t know most of them. For example, to close a window without exiting the program you can press command W, but if you have many windows open in which you want to close you can press command option w and they all close. Things like these can drastically speed up the computing process. Good tutorial for windows though!

ColdAchilles

January 3rd, 2008
at 12:59pm

these tips were very helpful to me because i never knew some of them mentioned. Now that i have obtained this knowledge, I will be able to run Windows with more ease and better performance.

DLSS

January 3rd, 2008
at 10:39pm

yeah launchy is small and awesome , i’m useing it since i found v0.1

and am so used to it that it annoys me wen working on other computers and alt+spacebar doesn’t do anything and i have to go through the start menu …

Ernest J Gainey III

January 3rd, 2008
at 4:04pm

Don’t forget Win+L to quickly lock your PC. Ctrl + Shift + Esc will also open the task manager.

kageo

January 3rd, 2008
at 4:15pm

That win+D one has just made my life a lot easier ^.^ i gotta say it’s better than right clicking the task bar followed by “Show the desktop” sometimes i cant even get to this because of the amount of windows open making it impossible to right click in the first place hahaha!

win+L is the one i use the most to lock the computer quickly, seen as it’s a shared pc aswell, it’s rather quicker than logging off and on every time I leave the computer.

i will always remember coming across win+u+enter to shut down the computer, the first keyboard shortcut i ever used =P if you can call it a short cut… altho it no longer works in xp or vista

C222

January 3rd, 2008
at 6:00pm

All keyboard shortcuts are quick useful things to use. I probably use Alt+tab the most then Alt+F4.

linkinpark9812

January 3rd, 2008
at 11:33pm

Those are great for people who are new to Windows or just didn’t even know what the Windows key was! Seems like most people know about the Alt+F4 and Alt+Tab (I personally didn’t know about WinKey+D and WinKey+E)

Nevertheless, Great Tips! :)

Arata75

January 4th, 2008
at 10:52am

damn, this is even more choppy then usual!

jack123ie

January 5th, 2008
at 12:03am

Pretty obvious shortcuts, there’s more advanced ones.

dhoy005

January 4th, 2008
at 8:48pm

WIN + M = Minimizes all windows. Quite similar with WIN + D

Michael Rivera (mrivera1)

January 4th, 2008
at 10:30pm

Windows key shortcuts can really make your computing experience a lot easier when you memorize them, so memorize them! If you can’t then just keep a list of them nearby so you can quickly look at them if you need them. I have been able to do my work so much faster thanks to the Windows shortcuts.

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