Share your keyboard tips and tricks
A trick I just learned was press control and one of the arrow keys to move the cursor a word at a time (instead of just a character at a time). You can combine that trick with shift and delete which makes it pretty useful and faster than just the arrow keys alone.
I also just discovered how useful the home and end keys are when working in text that doesn't wrap, it shoots you right to the end of the line, or start of the line.
In windows if you hit windowkey d it minimizes all the windows, it's good if you have tons of things open and need to get to the desktop. If you hit it again, it brings up the windows back up.
Linux, and Mac tips are good too.
kb posted this at 22:54 — 5th May 2007.
He has: 1,380 posts
Joined: Feb 2002
In Soviet Russia, the keyboard tricks you.
Anyways...
On Linux you can customize your keyboard to do what you want. For example, you can set the Windows key to lock the screen, or turn off the computer. Almost anything you can think of can be set to work by keyboard combo.
I've customized the normal things that I use to keyboard commands (lock screen, change windows, change focus, access a menu, etc)
One of the coolest things you can do with a keyboard on Linux involves running Beryl (a fancy windows manager)... you hit ctrl+left-or-right arrow, and it switches desktops... but in CUBE form.
How cool is that!?!?
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 04:17 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 3,348 posts
Joined: Jul 2001
I've customised just about everything in my GNU/Linux system, from the hardware level upwards.
My keyboard is a Happy Hacking Lite2, with Sun layout, meaning the Control key is in the right place and there is nothing absurd like a "Windows" key (only an extra option key
) to be found. The keyboard has switches to adjust a couple of minor settings too, and I've physically swapped keycaps to reflect that.
I've defaulted to the dvorak keymap using loadkeys, even in the console. Other than this, I'm hesitant to change keyboard settings in Linux, as I'd rather leave it to other programs at the user level.
My X uses dvorak, and I've created a handy .Xmodmap file to map shortcuts to greek symbols, superscript numbers and currency symbols. xkb is set to map meta and compose keys properly.
In KDE I've bound [incode]M-tab[/incode] to toggle my yakuake terminal, [incode]M-Esc[/incode] to focus fullscreen Emacs, [incode]M-,[/incode] and [incode]M-.[/incode] to cycle windows, and [incode]M-'[/incode] to minimise. KDE provides customisable application- and window-specific shortcuts, which is what allows me to focus a particular program's window.
Within applications like Emacs, Konqueror and yakuake, I've bound variations of [incode][CMS]-[,.][/incode] to cycle tabs or buffers. My Konqueror uses Emacs-like shortcuts, and has all sorts of hotkeys to focus widgets or load sites. KDE allows this with "multi-key shortcuts", so you can set [incode]C-x k[/incode], for instance, to kill a tab.
Recently my mouse failed, and I've started to rely entirely on the keyboard. Frankly, it's a lot nicer this way. I would be in no hurry to replace the mouse, were it not that a lot of websites are nearly impossible to use without a mouse. However, I'm kind of coping with this by controlling the pointer using the keyboard -- another feature of KDE's.
If someone else were to sit in my chair and use my computer as it is, I think they'd have a hard time getting even simple things done.
kb posted this at 04:46 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 1,380 posts
Joined: Feb 2002
Dvorak instead of QWERTY? That's ... that's ... freakin unheard of.
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 10:04 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 3,348 posts
Joined: Jul 2001
Are you being facetious?
demonhale posted this at 11:02 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 3,278 posts
Joined: May 2005
My keyboard has extra web and media buttons, volume controls etc... but for keyboard tips and tricks, I always like to use keyboard shortcuts for Windows PC's, like the use of Ctrl+Shift+Esc instead of Ctrl+Alt+del to open the task manager, and the use of the Tab keys when filling in online forms as well as the Shift+Tab to go backwards... and the fastest shutdown keys which would be to use WindowsKey+D then Alt+F4+u.... or if you need it shorter WindowsKey+U...
kb posted this at 18:09 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 1,380 posts
Joined: Feb 2002
No, I'm serious. At least here in the US, no-one uses any layout OTHER than QWERTY. Maybe I'm stupid? But I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same things here...
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 20:54 — 6th May 2007.
He has: 3,348 posts
Joined: Jul 2001
Ah, it's hard to read irony in hypertext, thought I'd check.
Qwerty is dominant just about everywhere that English language keyboards are used. My keyboard physically has a qwerty layout too, so I've had to learn to type dvorak on it without looking (incidentally a good thing).
Megan posted this at 14:59 — 7th May 2007.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
There are probably a lot of things I do normally without realizing it's a special shortcut. Like the ctrl-shift-arrow to select the next word. I took a word processing course one summer (because my mom made me because I didn't have a job) and learned a lot of those things. That was using Word Perfect before it had a GUI!
I like keyboard shortcuts a lot - I had some problems with my wrists several years ago and I learned that using the keyboard as much as possible distributes the strain across both arms and prevents strain.
I always like to customize my shortcuts as much as possible. Opera has a lot of great keyboard shortcuts and the ability to customize them however you want. I use that a lot. Same with any other program I use regularly. I really dislike programs that don't let me customize the keyboard shortcuts.
I haven't learned many of the shortcuts in Ubuntu yet - I'll have to find a reference to print out.
Megan
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