Common Keyboard Shortcuts Rarely Used!

No doubt, keyboard shortcuts makes our work easier and importantly “quick”. However there are many of them which are not much used but might help in making your work easy. I am now going to discuss some of the keyboard shortcuts for few software on Windows.

Mozilla Firefox (Windows)

• F7 – Caret Browsing [enables cursor movement in the page like a Word processing document for easy text copying]
• Ctrl+W / Ctrl+F4 – Close Tab
• Ctrl+F5 – Super Refresh [refreshes the page even if no changes were made to the page after it got loaded]
• Ctrl+L – Select Location (URL) bar
• Ctrl+K – Select Web Search bar
• Shift+Enter – Add .net to the URL
• Ctrl+Shift+Enter – Add .org to the URL

You can find the complete list here.

Gmail

Many of us are Gmail users and must be knowing about Gmail allowing keyboard shortcuts. By default it is disabled, however you can enable from your Gmail Settings. I tried myself and found Google Chrome is not supported. Few of the shortcuts are:

• c – Compose new mail
• g and i (alternate: u) – Returns you to the Inbox view
• j – Select an older conversation (email)
• k – Select a newer conversation (email)
• o or “Enter” – Opens / expands the conversation (email)
• x – Select a conversation to apply an action
• s – Stars the selected conversation(s)

The above two pictures shows the moving marker towards the older conversation when you press “j”. You can find all other shortcuts for Gmail here.

Internet Explorer 8

I am covering IE 8 because this is the last stable update you can install.

• F7 – Start Caret Browsing
• Tab – Move through all items on your web page and the browser window
• Ctrl+Shift+P – Start inPrivate window [do not stores any web traces locally]
• Ctrl+Shift+T – Restore the last tab you closed
• Ctrl+(n) – Switch between tabs (where ‘n’ can be 1 to 8)
• Ctrl+9 – Switch to the last tab
• Alt+D – Selects the Address (URL) bar
• F4 – Display the list of addresses [in the URL bar]

For the entire list, click here.

I do hope you will be able to benefit from the above information. Do drop in your comments if keyboard shortcuts have ever helped you to speed up your work.