Hotkeys that you know and love?

[Jason425]

I think that was his point. I agree with win-f1... that help program sucks and even takes up a service (even if you disable it)

[Omega]

Originally Posted by xMerCLorDx

Oh also if you ever get a chance try mouse gestures, on my desktop I love using opera and using gestures.

If you have opera, just click and drag left or right quickly. It's not so handy on my laptop, backspace and alt+arrow works nicer. you can get gestures for most browsers if you look for the plugins for ffox and such.

<3 Opera . I think I probably actually use [hold right click] + [left click] and [hold left click] + [right click] more than the [hold right click] + [drag mouse left/right] for forward and back, but I [hold right click] + [drag mouse down] and ctrl+d (Paste and go) quite a bit too. [Hold right click] + [drag mouse up, then down] to refresh gets used occasionally too, as does [hold right click] + [make an L shape] to close the tab. I use these things so naturally now, that when I'm on another computer, or in windows explorer (browsing my files), I occasionally try to use mouse gestures (without success ). [.] for in-line find on a web page, [ctrl] + [left/right] for forward/back, [1/2] for previous/next tab, [h] for address bar, [ctrl] + [up/down] to navigate through links (commonly following a [.] in-line find), and [hold right click] + [scroll wheel up/down] to navigate through tabs, and [middle click] on a tab to close it are high on my list of Opera shortcuts too. (Have I mentioned I like Opera? )

Aside from Opera, though, I also use:
Windows Key + Pause = Bring up system properties ... quick way to get to device manager, etc.
Right click on a file, [Shift + D] to permanently delete the file (quick, keeps one hand on mouse with minimal movement, other hand in home row)

I've also bound a few shortcuts to ctrl-alt-p for putty, ctrl-alt-o for opera, ctrl-alt-c for calculator, ctrl-alt-n for notepad, etc...

[Jason425]

you can also shift-delete for a confirmation to skip the recycle bin.

[Omega]

Yup, I know, but I generally click (right hand on mouse) on the file I want to delete, and my left hand stays in its home row position. Pressing shift+delete would require one of my hands to move, since delete is on the right side of the keyboard (and not accessible from a home-row positioning anyway), so it's less efficient most of the time for me. And, since hotkeys/shortcuts/gestures are all about efficiency in performing tasks, that's the deciding factor.

[Jason425]

we're such geeks... analyzing the efficiency of hotkeys...

[Tyler]

Originally Posted by Jason425

we're such geeks... analyzing the efficiency of hotkeys...

Why not, actually has anyone heard of the keyboard formatting dvorak?

My desktop has all the keyboard keys arranged in dvorak, not that I look at my keys anyway. It's kind of interesting to have a qwerty user use my keyboard though

I am sub-proficient at it, and can comfortably interchange whenever. It's also good to use on a portable machine so people will have that much less probability of being able to use your machine. Here it is if you don't know what I'm talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

The basic idea with QWERTY was that the keys were archaically separated to prevent actual mechanical jamming at high speed keying on typewriters. Most typists learned this way because of the mechanical builds of the typewriters of the age.

Dvorak is a format that came out and it put all the most used keys on the home row, and the lesser used keys surrounding those. This makes typing more efficient in that your fingers move less distance for most actions of common letters. for example one hit's 'E'very often and it takes more of a movement on QWERTY than that of Dvorak.

There's my little spiel, if you want to learn more you can actually read about it at the link I provided.

[Jason425]

it might be nice to learn dvorak, but I don't want to rearrange the keys on my keyboard... :/

You don't have to, just change your format. It says how on that page:

WinXP "Control Panel → Regional and Language Options → Languages → Details...."

for other OS's go check the link.

[Jason425]

Yeah but since i'm not familiar with the format i'd not know what I was hitting.