Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts for Power Users
I read Tim Sneath’s blog and he had a massive post on some secrets in Windows 7. He had some great tips around keyboard shortcuts so I thought I would consolidate them for everyone’s benefits.
Taskbar Shortcuts
In Windows 7, you now permanently pin applications to the bar, internally, we call this feature the “super-bar.” In addition to clicking, you can push “WIN+[number key] ” to run the applications.
- Win+1 launches the first app on the left (Internet Explorer)
- Win+2 launches the second app (Libraries Explorer)
Connecting to Projectors or Secondary Displays
- Win+P is a no nonsense way to connecting displays to computers and switching from single monitor to dual-display
- Win+Shift+Left Arrow – Move the window to the screen on the left
- Win+Shift+Right Arrow – Move the window to the screen on the right
Managing Windows
- Win+Home – Minimize all windows except the current active window
- Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow – Resizes windows based on the new Win7 window docking feature;
- Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes;
- Win+Shift+Up Arrow and Win+Shift+Down Arrow maximizes and restores the vertical size.
- Win+T – This is like “alt-tabbing” through the Peek menus. Once you hit Win+T you can use the arrow keys to navigate left right and up the windows tree.
- Win+Space – By pushing this is and hold the Win-key, you can peek at your desktop without dragging it to the bottom right corner
- CTRL+shift +click – when you click on an application while hold CTRL+shift, it will run with elevated permissions i.e. Administrator Privileges.
- Win+E – opens Explorer
These are great keyboard enhancements. One feature that needs to be improved is the Win+Up Arrow shortcut. The problem is that if the user minimizes all the way with Win+Down Arrow to the taskbar, there is no way to re-maxmize the window in one easy shortcut. Techincally, Win+Up Arrow should remember applications that were minimized, or as a last resort, go through a brute force approach restore windows to the desktop. Beside this beta feature shortcoming, these are welcomed enhancements to Windows and just shows that Microsoft hasn’t forgotton about the keyboard users.