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Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Activate specific windows in Windows 7 with a taskbar keyboard shortcut
The Windows 7 taskbar has large, chunky icons. They're easy to hit with the mouse, but what's nicer still is that they're easy to count. You can easily see what's the third icon, for example, and so, hitting Win+3 would be like clicking that icon. That means if the application isn't running yet, Win+3 is going to run it; and if it already is running, Win+3 will switch between all open instances of that application, and even pop up a neat Aero Peek pane next to the taskbar, showing you thumbnails of all of the instances you're switching between. If have a few apps pinned to your taskbar and don't switch their order very often, very soon you'll know their numbers by heart, and using Win+Number could become second nature.
Come back tomorrow for the next keyboard tip, or, if you'd like to read a whole bunch at once, check out Sebastian's epic list.
[Image credit: orangeacid]
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsCougar AbogadoJan 4th 2011 1:44PM
Thanks for the tip, Erez. I feel like I live on keyboard shortcuts (and I think Windows has about 1M).
On a somewhat related note, I've really enjoyed the new keyboard on the Cr-48. On the other hand, I'm puzzled about why it lacks ctrl+home/end and ctrl+delete equivalents. For example, I can get to the end of a line of text by pressing ctrl+alt+down arrow. If I want to skip to the beginning/end of a text box/document, I'm hosed. Same goes for deleting entire words (I can just delete one letter at a time using alt+backspace).
Maybe you could put in a good word with the Chromium OS or Google devs (whichever's responsible), as I think my voice would sound in much softer . . .
chatur.abhishekJan 4th 2011 1:49PM
have you published the Win+Spaceba trick to peek at desktop quickly?
w7proJan 4th 2011 2:24PM
This is a great shortcut tip and definitely makes it easier to navigate through Windows without having to rely solely on the mouse.
tonne22690Jan 4th 2011 2:57PM
Is there a way to disable some or all of these shortcut keys? We use many of them for other purposes and don't relish the idea of having to re do a lot of macros.
blasztaJan 4th 2011 10:37PM
@tonne22690 : The logic is wrong. Your macros should not interfere with these shortcuts. Let say you create a macro to wipe entire server data, including the backup and you assign Ctrl+P shortcut to launch it. The a new employee come and she press Ctrl+P to print a document and BAM!
Is she doing something wrong? No. She just did what she usually do with all computers she's been using before.
So before you assign a shortcut, you should know that it won't interfere with the common shortcut and especially Win+anything key unless you know MS would certainly won't use it in the future.
tonne22690Jan 5th 2011 4:36PM
@blaszta Were we starting from scratch I agree; avoid keystrokes used by the operating system. We are being dragged kicking and screaming from Win XP to Win 7 and certain keystrokes have been co opted by Win7 that we have used for over a decade. For example, the Win P in combination with alt, ctrl, space, tab, numlock, backspace and other keys forms a large library that worked flawlessly in XP and earlier. Now Win 7 has taken the Win P combo and regardless of any other key stroke does what it wants to, something useless to us, but screws up the entire win p macro library execution and inconsistently at that. Same with Win T. Some keystrokes haven't been stolen yet, like Win S which works flawlessly in all combinations. We would much rather disable the win p (or t) shortcut if possible so the question remains: