It occurred to me the other day how short life is, and how much time keyboard shortcuts can save. Don’t worry, I’m not about to pitch you a self-betterment book or try to sell you anything. Oniions isn’t a sales channel. My point is that the internet is vast. The amount of knowledge available is astounding. The value of a waking minute has never been higher.

I decided to make a repository of the computer knowledge that I’ve found to be most helpful. It’s not complete. It probably never will be. Bookmark this page.

Computer Assisted Internet Browsing

While technically speaking, an internet browser is a tool to help you parse information, I’m not referring to these oftentimes outdated tools when I say that reading internet data on your computer without a tool to help you parse the information is like trying to fill a swimming pool with a drinking glass – possible, but it will a long time. One of my favorite parts of the “Matrix” movie was the concept of being able to learn things extremely quickly, such as Trinity’s on-demand helicopter lessons. Even though a direct brain-machine link may still be a thing of science fiction despite Elon Musk’s efforts to date, computers can be used to drastically reduce the amount of time required to learn new information by harvesting and collecting information for you while you’re doing other things, like sleeping, cooking, playing with your kids, or… well, sleeping.

Computer keyboard Shortcuts

The whole point of computers is to make life easier. The point of the keyboard is to make entering data into a computer possible. The point of a keyboard shortcut is to make that process easier. Ergo, learning keyboard shortcuts makes your life easier. This is, in my opinion, the single largest area of computer knowledge that people overlook.

Some keyboard shortcuts are specific to the operating system (ctrl + alt + del is a Windows shortcut). Others are ubiquitous. The universal (or close to it) ones are:

  • alt + tab
  • ctrl + x (or c)
  • ctrl + v
  • ctrl + z
  • ctrl + w

Before we go on, I want to show you how useful the alt + tab shortcut is. Try pressing the alt key and the tab key, but before you do, make sure you hold the alt key down. Then, press tab. As a result, a window of all of your currently active windows should have come up. After that, you can just press tab again to toggle the cursor focus from one window to the next. Adding in the “shift” key before pressing tab (remember, we’re still holding the alt key) changes the direction. Give it a shot. Combining these shortcuts will make your computing life easier, and make you faster, saving you time. You’re welcome.

Other forms of Keyboard Shortcuts and controls

Moving away from keyboard shortcuts, let’s talk about keyboard cursor control. You may already know that pressing tab by itself automatically jumps the focus to the next clickable link, button, or focal area. However, you may not know that when you’re entering text, pressing shift before moving the cursor with the arrow keys will select the text you’re passing over (the same way clicking and dragging the mouse over text does). Adding the ctrl key automatically jumps to the next full word – technically, the next area of whitespace – instead of the next character. Be mindful of the number of steps you’ve taken when manipulating text this way, as some systems limit the amount of data pieces sent to the clipboard to five (or some predetermined amount). Be aware that you don’t inadvertently bump out a piece of data that you weren’t ready to part with.

We hope that this has been an informative article, and invite you to bookmark this page.