Six essential Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts.
Jan 30Windows 8, Its here, its revolutionary, its the biggest thing since .. since .. Oh forget it 🙂 Marketing talk always makes me sleepy so by the time the silly adds come to an end I’m always fast asleep. What I do know however is that the entire new Windows interface (Which is pretty daring to say the least ) only works if you can TOUCH it. However, not all OEM machines that get shipped today HAVE that touchscreen .. so you go have to look for your charms using your little mouse pointer. This is about as unproductive as trying to run a mouse centred interface (like for example a Citrix connection) on an iPad. So time to beef up your Windows 8 Ninja skills with some keyboard bindings you cannot afford to miss.
- Windows key – X : Brings up some advanced functions like the run menu, the control panel and the command line. Ninja Style !
- Windows key – D : Warps you to “Desktop mode”
- Windows key – E : Opens up the explorer. This one has been around for a loooong time and still saves my bacon everyday.
- Windows key – H : Whether its kitty’s, a word file, a letter to your grandma or hardcore porn : This key combo lets you Share it.
- Windows key – M : Minimise everything and shoot towards desktop mode.
- Windows key – Q : Just like spotlight on OSX , this combo brings up the search interface to search for apps and data.
By not having to slide your hands of the keyboard, the Windows 8 interface becomes more and more productive as you are working on a system that does NOT have a touch interface (and to be quite honest, it also speeds up things if your screen DOES have a touch interface). It proves that both mouse faced and touch based interfaces just cant keep up with a superfast key combo punching ninja … The only touch-enable ninja I know slices fruit.
So what do YOU think of the ‘We can no longer call this Metro” interface of Windows 8 and what are your favourite keyboard combo’s ?
