Hands-On Windows 112 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
 

0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows. It's been a long time. We're going to take a look at keyboard shortcuts. Some things have changed. There's more. There's a ton of these things. Let's get started.

Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to take a look. It's the first of two parts keyboard shortcuts. This is something we did possibly years ago. I think it might date back to the very beginning of the show. It's certainly been a long time, however long it's been, and interestingly, there have been some changes. There's some additional keyboard shortcuts. There's actually a few that are gone now as well, which is interesting.

But I've for a long time felt that if you want to be really efficient in Windows I hesitate to say, you know, be a power user, I don't mean it like that but if you want to be more efficient, there's really no better way than mastering at least some core keyboard shortcuts right. When I'm out in the world, I see people using computers. This happens with me and my wife when we're flying, for example. I'll see her. You know, use her finger on the touchpad and move the cursor around and click a little icon. And, you know, is there a better way to do that? You know, is there a faster way or a more efficient way? I'm a writer. I like to keep my hands on the keyboard, but no matter what you're doing, it seems to me it's always more efficient, if you can, rather than trying to click on some little target. So let's take a look.

All right, so this is Windows 11 24-H2. Not much has changed since the beginning of Windows 11 in a lot of ways, although some things actually have changed. The most obvious one, of course, is the start button, which is just the start key that everyone has on a keyboard. That's been there for years and years, so that's kind of a standard feature. There's also a right-click menu here, so when you right-click on this, you get this menu. A lot of people call this the power user menu, which is not the right name, by the way. It's actually the quick link menu, but you can also bring that up with a keyboard shortcut, which is Windows key plus X, and so I'm doing that right there with the keyboard. And then, of course, in 24H2 now they've added this selection rectangle to everything. You're going to see this a lot today, but that allows you to navigate around with the keyboard very easily, right, and so in almost any UI you can tab from control to control, or in this case, I'm using the arrow key, the down arrow key, to go down. So if I wanted to run this thing, for example, I could just hit enter or space and it would load this, that thing, whatever that app is. So that's great. The other keyboard shortcut associated with start is start search, as we think of it, and what that means is, if I bring this thing up, I'm not touching the mouse or the touchpad, but I can just start typing. So if I want to start something like the Xbox app, I just type XB and that comes up in the search results, right. So this has been consistent in Windows for decades. So, no matter what the UI looks like, you've always had that capability. It's still there today in Windows 11.

So, looking at the desktop from left to right on the taskbar, specifically here, every one of these things that you see has a keyboard shortcut associated with it, right? So the widgets over here, I could click on that to bring that up, of course, but you can also do Windows key plus W to bring that thing up. This brings up an interesting point, because you don't have to have that thing. I wrote up the wrong thing. You don't have to have that thing on the screen. It's taking up space. You might want to turn that off. So, for example, you could turn off the widgets there. It's not there, but I can still type Windows key plus W still comes up right. So this is important to know. And that's true of a few other items. We'll take a look at those in a moment. The next one over start. We've already done that.

The next one over from that is search, which can take different forms. Right now it's an icon on this particular screen. Sometimes it's a search box, the search button, et cetera. It could be gone. This one curiously has two keyboard shortcuts Windows Key plus Q or Windows Key plus S. They both do exactly the same thing. I keep hitting the button, so it's doing it twice.

I also disabled search highlights, which is not usually the way this looks, but that's because I can't stand it. But I will enable it for today if I can or maybe I can't. So I'll just leave that alone. But normally you see search highlights for today if I can or maybe I can't, so I guess I'll just leave that alone. But normally you see search highlights. But again, with either, however, you get to this even, just as with start, you can just start typing. So if I type, you know, control panel, whatever, it comes up in the search results as before. So start and search both work the same way in that regard. Okay.

The next one over here is Task View. Task View is one of the ways that you can multitask. The other one is Alt-Tab, which we'll look at a little bit later, but it also provides access to the virtual desktop feature in Windows 11. So you can click that to bring this thing up. I don't have any. Actually, I'll make a new desktop here, because we're going to get into this later, and I'll call this, like you know, games or whatever, it doesn't matter. And if I could spell, I would call it games Um, and you can get rid of it, whatever. But you don't need that thing there. You don't have to click on it, right? Because windows key plus tab brings up the same interface and, just like before, you could see that selection highlight. You can move around with the arrow keys. I could hit space or enter and change desktops. So that is something that could still happen. So it's still there and that.

And let me go back. Let's see if I get the go back to personalization taskbar so I could hide all of those things. Only start. I cannot hide and I can still access all of those items without them being on screen. So I'll leave them on for consistency's sake. But those are things I actually turn off on my own computers. Okay, so much to do. We've got way more to go. I'm going to get to the icons here in the middle of the screen. So everything to the right of task view from this file explorer icon. On those are pin shortcuts and that means they can all be removed directly. If I want to right click one and say I'm pinned from taskbar, it goes away. You can't do that with these. When you right click these, they don't have that option. So that's in one way how they're different. But over here we have the tray area.

Quick settings was an interface that debuted with windows 11. It's based on a similar feature in chrome os actually, and windows. Key plus a is how you bring that up again with that selection rectangle. That I kind of can't stand. But there it is. There's a sub feature here and that's this sound output thing right, and this is where you can see the various ways that I could output sound on this particular computer and then, as I select them, what spatial sound capabilities may or may not exist in each, and then the volume makes it right. There's actually a way to get right to that. So if you want to go, just skip through the quick settings part, you can just do windows key plus control plus v and it goes right to that screen, right, instead of stopping first at um, at quick settings. That's kind of. If you do that kind of thing, a lot, that's good.

Um down here we have a couple things going on. This little bell icon is actually going to go away soon, but that is indicating notifications. So the calendar and notifications are tied together, for whatever reason. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But windows key plus n is how you bring those things up together, right, instead of clicking now. You wouldn't get rid of that, of course, but that's the the way you get into that and you can really not see it. But over here in the corner is show desktop. So if I open a couple windows here and type windows key plus d, everything goes away right. I can hit it again. It all comes back. So that's like a and that's the same thing as just clicking in that area. It does exactly the same thing. Close those All right. Now this is the advanced part of the taskbar. This is pretty cool and this is a new feature. So I think we talked about this in a recent episode, but it's good to go over this again.

Windows key plus T has been around for a while. That selects the first shortcut in the taskbar, which in my case is File Explorer. That shortcut has been around. That's a thing. It has the more obvious selection rectangle. Now that's new. But you know, arrow key right, arrow key right, arrow key right, right, I can switch between each of these things. If I hit enter or space, it will launch that thing. But now one of the new things is I can also hit the home key to go to the first item. I can hit the end key to go to the last item, right. So that's kind of useful. And then one of the other ones is this one's been around for a while. This is the type of thing you would almost have to memorize, but each of these things is also assigned a number. So Copilot is the second one in it's number two from you know, with File Explorer being first. So if I want to launch that directly, I could type Windows key plus two, which I just did, and then that thing comes up. So that that's not new, that's been around a while, but it's kind of a. That's kind of a cool one to know. All right.

So for window management, I should probably bring up a couple of apps for this. To make any sense, we've been working with Windows in Windows since you know Windows right. So it's been. That's kind of the point. Um, there's a lot of, uh, keyboard shortcuts that are common to most windows. These aren't a hundred percent consistent, but, um, some are there, some aren't, depending similar, new, some are old, et cetera.

So in an app like notepad, you might open a new document and then control W will close that thing. Right, control W is typical for a document-based application. If you want to close a document inside of an app, if you want to close the entire app. This gets a little convoluted these days, unfortunately. Alt F4 typically works. It does not work for this. Oh, maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing. Yeah, so I just typed alt F4. That's one way to close the app most apps with the keyboard. It's a little hard now because we have these function keys and we don't use the function rows for function keys and most in most cases we use them for multimedia and volume and light controls and so forth. So it can be a little hard. You'd have to type a function plus alt, plus F4, depending on your keyboard the biggest, the oldest this might be one of the oldest features in windows.

It's still around. It's something called the window menu key. It's, and this is actually something I use all the time, so I want to make sure it's available. Yeah, so you type alt space and it brings up this menu. So this menu has historically been associated with this icon that was in a title bar. This particular app doesn't even actually have a title bar, so they've kind of recreated it. This app also does not have a title bar, but when you do that keyboard shortcut it still works. It's pretty much there in every window in Windows. It's possible as an app developer to not use it, but most people doing Microsoft typically does, and what it gives you is these options for moving a window around or resizing it using just a keyboard and the reason this is super helpful.

I can't really demonstrate this easily, actually. Yes, I guess I suppose I could Is, every once in a while you'll get into the situation where a window opens like that, so you can hit Alt plus Space and then M for Move, and then you can use the arrow keys to move it around and get it back on screen right the one I typically do, though key plus, I'm sorry, alt plus space, rather and then x is maximize. That's the one I actually use the most and, by the way, that's another great way to get it on screen. And then you can drag it down from there and make sure none of it is off off to the side. So total legacy feature, but still very interesting, um, worth knowing. You know for sure I do use that one quite a bit.

And then, of course, it's Windows. We have all these snap features that other operating systems are starting to copy. So some of the obvious one Windows key plus left or right arrow key to bring it to half the size there. Right, we could, you know, snap this one over here, that kind of thing. But there's a lot more than that. You could snap to the top half of the screen. So it's Windows key, alt plus up and then you get to do the other one right at the bottom. So that's kind of cool. There's also a Windows key shift, left, right that will move it onto different screens. Windows key plus Z will bring up the snap layout menu right now. The other way to get that is with the mouse. You just mouse over this thing, but this gives you these pre-made layouts for your windows. This is not a great example unfortunately I don't have that many windows on the screen but and then you can use the arrow keys to choose the one that you want.

Okay, so we also have all plus tab. That's been around again probably since the beginning. Um, I'll tab, uh, you're going to see all the stuff, including the things that are off screen here for me. But, um, I think we're all pretty familiar with that. I'm holding the alt key down and tab, tab, tab. You can also hold on the shift key and work in reverse, and this is something I actually have to do a lot because, for whatever reason, sometimes I'll bring up something, something like paint, and I want to go to notepad and for some reason, notepad is down here, so I can alt or shift, tab rather, um, to get to it backwards, right. So that's kind of good to know, although I'll tap. I'll. Tap itself is pretty basic, but shift key, uh, alt shift tab is useful to know when key plus tab we talked about that's task view, um slightly richer view and it's, but it also stays on screen. So one of the nice things about this view is that when you run this it stays there. I don't have to touch anything. With alt tab, you have to hold down the alt key so that there's there's a bit of handiness to that as well, which is pretty good. Um, what else do we got? This is so much. Um.

There's uh browser apps that support tabs, and actually this is one. Web browsers is another example. Um, fire, notepad and terminal um support this. You have these kind of standard keyboard shortcuts. If I want a new keyboard shortcut, uh, control t, right for a different view.

Control w, like we said earlier, to close. That works in browsers as well. If you close a view by mistake, I believe this is only in the browser actually. So if I go here and say we'll go to applecom like yep and then I close that thing, I'm like oh, I didn't mean to do that. Control shift T. So instead of new tab, it's control shift. He reopens the last closed tab so you can go back if you've made a mistake. That's a good one to know for sure. Um, and then we, oh, and then just close the browser, but the basic browser controls um, you'll find, uh, all browsers will support control L to get into the address bar and then do your thing. In windows, though, we can do all D. I don't know if it's the only place you see that, but if you use a Mac or Linux or a Chromebook, you're going to want to memorize Control-L, because that's the one that's universal. It works everywhere.

This one, I don't know that I can show this. I looked around for an app that would support this, but in the Windows 8 era, and then well into the windows 10 era, we used to have this notion of full screen apps, and they're kind of going away. So, um, the only one that really has it is actually edge, right, so if you go into edge and hit f11, which would be nice and difficult on this keyboard, um, oh, I get that. All right, you can go into full screen here. Um, games, though, support alt enter. I'm going to try this. I know it's not going to work. But, um, solitaire, which is built into windows, used to support that, but they've updated it. Now it doesn't support that true full screen mode, not, certainly not by alt entering. But if you play uh normal games off of steam or xbox whatever and it's not full screen for some reason, try alt enter. That's uh, that's a really good one to know close that guy.

And then just some quick uh documented documents, sorry, related uh things. Let me see if I can find a good document to open, actually because that will make a difference. Um, yeah, okay. So this is like a microsoft Microsoft code of conduct document that I wanted to reference because we have to update this for our website and it's repeated. So you'll actually see it says Microsoft's mission, microsoft's mission. So I think it's in here three times. But I just wanted to get some body of text right. So, control S people know If you wanted to save this as a different name, control shift S is save as right, so now we can go save it as something else. In fact, I should probably do that Just to make sure I'm not overriding something. I wanted to save All the basic things, like you know.

Control C I think most people are familiar with the copy control. X for cut, control, v for paste pretty common. Hopefully you know those. There's also a Windows key plus V and this brings up the clipboard history, which is disabled by default, and so you can enable this thing and put it over here. You can put it anywhere, it doesn't have to be on screen, but now I can control C, some different things, so I can say I'm going to put that in there, I'm going to put this in here and I'll cut that one, but now I want to paste, and when this thing comes up you're going to see all the stuff that's in the history there, right? So that's actually kind of really helpful if you need multiple items in the clipboard, right? So not enabled by default. Good to know. Let me get this thing back the way it was.

Obviously, move around with the arrow key. Everyone kind of knows that Control, but less obvious. If you hold down the control key, you can move forward or back using the arrow keys, right, which is really nice. If you hold down shift, you can select as you go with the arrow keys, but you can hold down shift control and you'll select one word at a time, right? So home, end. All work in a similar fashion. If I wanted to grab this entire line, well I could just hit let me go to someplace in the document to make it more obvious. I could just hit home to go home, hold down shift and hit end selects the whole thing. Then I can hold down shift and go up down arrow in whatever direction and keep selecting more and more. So that kind of stuff is really helpful to know and you know again when you're writing.

It's kind of nice not to have to take your hands off the keyboard. Especially this is a little hard on this keyboard this is not the one I usually use, but a laptop keyboard but everything's in sort of a standard place. You can really just get going. Now, this particular app, I think, will auto-save if it's in OneDrive anyway, but you know Control-S as you go to save Control-Shift-S if you want to save it under a new name. So just a bunch of things you can do without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Okay, there's so much more. There's always more when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. This is kind of the basics. So we're going to take another look at this next week and in that video I'll do some of the keyboard shortcuts I really like to use personally, and then some more advanced keyboard shortcuts that are a little more unusual and maybe not so well known, and then we'll talk about some of the keyboard shortcuts that have come and gone, because there's some new ones and then there are at least one anyway that is suddenly missing in action. So we'll have more soon. Thank you for watching. Hopefully you found this useful and, like I said, we'll have a new video next week. We have new videos every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash how. And yeah, that's about it. So, thank you so much. Thank you especially to our club twit members. We love you. I'll see you next week.