Chuck The Geek.com

Keyboard and mouse shortcuts for fun and profit

January 24th, 2006 by Chuck Sharp

Keyboard Shortcuts - Recap & Custom Hotkeys

If you aren’t familiar with selecting, cutting, and pasting text, using the keyboard, or navigating around windows without a mouse, learn how. Once you get that, you can go for the advanced shortcuts.

After getting familiar and comfortable with those, you can start creating your own shortcuts using free software. The free program that’s the rave right now, and that I like alot, is Qliner hotkeys. To install the hotkeys software, download the zip file, unzip it to a folder (I use 7-zip, a free and incredible program for zip file management), and then run the setup.exe program. ** One note: if you have a Windows key (the flag key between the Control and Alt keys), you might want to un-check the option in the installation setup screens that lets you use the Caps Lock key as a Windows key.

Once hotkeys is installed, it will begin running. Here’s the most important and coolest part of this program: if you hold down the Windows key for several seconds, a keyboard picture comes up that shows you all the Windows + shortcuts that exist. It’s a cheatsheet!

To make your own hotkey shortcut, bring up the keyboard map by holding down the Windows key, and while the map is up (keep pressing the Windows key), right-click your mouse on the key you want to assign a shortcut to. Then, click the “New Hotkey” menu item. Click on the “Browse” button, and then go look for your program to assign. Usually, you’ll find your program in C:\Program Files\the product, company, or program’s folder. Select the program, hit Ok, and you can use Windows + [assigned key] to access your program! This also appears to work with folders.

Mouse basics

The right mouse button

In just about every text field/box, word-processing document, web browser, or other application, clicking the right mouse button on that field or application’s content will bring up a menu. This menu is called the context menu, and it can also be opened by pressing the context key on your keyboard (looks like a mouse and a menu next to the right Control key). It’s called the context menu because it brings up a menu of possible actions that depend on what you’re doing. For instance, if you’re in MS Word and you click the right button while the mouse cursor is in the document area of the screen, you’ll get a menu that lets you cut, copy, paste, and format the font and paragraph, among some other options. If you’re in Internet Explorer or Firefox, the right mouse button on a web page will bring up a menu that has the “Back” and “Forward” commands, along with many others.

You can also right-click just about any object in Windows, like a desktop icon, a file or folder in Windows Explorer, the taskbar, programs listed in the taskbar, etc. Play around, you’ll probably find some useful commands in those menus.

The scroll wheel

Almost all new mice (mouses? meeses?) today have a wheel between the left and right button. In any window on you screen where there is a scrollbar that you can use to move to different parts of a document, such as a web page, you can roll the mouse wheel backward and forward to scroll instead. It’s such a tiny thing, but it’s so amazingly useful. Once you start using the scroll wheel, you’ll never look back.

You can also click the scroll wheel down like a mouse button. If you do that in a scrollable area, like a web page, you’ll see a circle on your screen show up with arrows in it. Until you click any mouse button again, your document will scroll around as you move your mouse cursor up and down. I don’t use this feature as much, but it’s there if you need it.

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Entry Filed under: PC Basics, Productivity