10 Computer Shortcuts: Obvious to Techies but Unknown to the Rest (Plus: New World Record)

Quick question for all, as I'm testing a plug-in: if you read this post in RSS, did the entire post display, or did it get cut off? Thanks and have a great weekend! Tim

The entire post displayed in my RSS reader. Perfect! My favorite shortcut in Windows is Alt-Tab->Tab->Tab->etc: Move quickly between windows, and find lost windows

I'm addicted to Alt+Tab for moving from one app to another. Also, Ctrl+tabnumber to move to any tab. Enjoy! Sent from my mobile using FeedM8

I recently discovered a tip that has saved heaps of time: In Firefox, using the middle (or scrollwheel) button to click on links opens them in a new tab. (Entire post showed in Google Reader 🙂

Ctrl-D wich minimizes all windows. I've recently souped up my keyboard with Autohotkeys and now have loads of shortcuts with my fave being typing out my addy in full by hitting the otherwise useless INSERT key. http://www.autohotkey.com/

Sorry meant to add: I saw your entire post in my RSS reader.

The entire post displayed in my google reader. I really like the Ctrl F shortcut (find) in Firefox. Whenever i'm looking for a certain word or phrase I just hit the 'highlight all' button to quickly go through the text and find what i'm looking for.

More useful shortcuts: M$ Button L – locks the station. Useful if you go out for 5 minutes and don't want anyone to change your status in Skype 😉 M$ Button D (as well as M) – minimizes all the applications For Firefox: Ctrl Tab – changes pages in new window

Kind of cheating here, but if you're a Mac user and haven't yet discovered these two gems: – Quicksilver (free) : http://blacktree.com/projects/quicksilver.html . Here's quick video tutorial that some dude made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBvFUhTqKK4 . – TextPander ($30) : http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/ Both of them are easy to start using immediately, but expandable over time. Serious time savers! Re: RSS, the entire post displayed fine.

Get Autohotkey and make your own shortcuts!

Hi Tim, My favourite is actually holding down the Ctrl and rolling your middle mouse roller. What it does is it zooms in or out your window or increases or decreases your font size. It works for almost all windows applications including firefox, IE, Word, Powerpoint etc. Try it out!

In Firefox (and IE), to enlarge the font, hold down the CTRL button and use the scroll wheel on the mouse to increase or decrease the size of the text.

Wow, I consider myself an ubernerd (IT security consultant) and I picked up a few new ones. I was going to suggest creating macro's to speed up small tasks. I use one to paste unformatted text when I'm creating reports, but then I realized, none of us should be spending time with formatting. Along with the power button, alt F4 is my favorite (close window).

What a post! the shortcuts…i use often…the powerlifting??? i'm not sure what to think about that. I'm going to cancel my home security system and see if Joe can just stand by my front door.

ctrl c / v for copy paste. Sadly this wasn't supposed to be standard and in linux it doesn't work much so I have to learn using ctrl insert / shift insert instead. ctrl f activates find. I use this a lot in firefox to search for words on websites. Here's some nifty features if you have compiz in linux, this is for the people who know how to activate such nifty stuff… alt shift uparrow for window selector, it arranges all windows so I can see everything at once and pick the window I want. ctrl alt left/right to go to next/previous desktop. alt click'n'drag to move a window (doesn't require compiz I think)

I haven't been on a desktop machine with a mouse for 8 years now and the more I can stay away from the touchpad, the better. In FF: * Alt D to get to the address bar * Alt Home to go to your homepage (Y! Home Page junkie) * Ctrl W to close a tab * Ctrl F5 to do a full reload of a page (bypasses cache) Windows General: * windows key r (opens run) … (changed a bit in vista but you can go back to the old school stuff if you want) * after windows key r you can type in a drive letter to open a window for that drive (c:) you can type in a url and open a browser if you don't already have one open. You can type in an app name (notepad) etc etc *ctrl esc works in place of the windows key if you're on a keyboard w/o the windows key. ** Always check your menus and help ( per app ) for a full list of whats avaliable. Search "keyboard shortcuts" .. A quick 5 minute read might shave 5 minutes a day off your computer time.

Some helpful firefox shortcuts Ctrl Tab = Next tab Ctrl pg up = Next tab (right –>) Ctrl pg down = Previous tab (<– left)

I am a big fan of key board short cuts. I didn't know about control-k, so that is a nice one. For those who don't know about the application ActiveWords and are interested in getting some shortcuts on steroids, than you might be interested. If allows you to create your own shortcuts for just about anything you can think of that can be done with the mouse. See http://www.activewords.com/. Point of disclosure, I am a user of AW and not an employee. Also, the app is rock solid, which is important, because their support is non-existent for the rare times you might need it.

I agree. Alt Tab is my favorite and most utilized keyboard short cut. Works on PC and Mac. Thanks for the google reader suggestion. I've been using it for a few days now and it is wonderful. My browsing time has been reduced from 45 minutes to 5 minutes.

Tim, My favorite Obvious Shortcut is using "J" and "K" to move down or up one article in Google Reader. (Not that I don't read every word of your posts…)

The following is Windows only. Sorry, I don't have a Mac. Not mentioned so far E opens Windows Explorer. Not quite on topic, but if you are not on Vista you need Colibri (colibri.leetspeak.org). Just trust me 🙂 As mentioned by others, if you are techie enough and on Windows you must have AutoHotKey. On my system Ctrl g from any application searches Google for the currently selected text – very useful. It also performs macro expansion for me which is very useful in email and instant messaging. For example: cych is replaced with "Dude, can you come here?", ut is replaced with "Are you there?", etc. It's handy in emails for expanding product names and other common acronyms. Any AutoHotKey users have a script for open Messenger's "Send an instant message window"? I've been struggling with that for awhile. Some additional info/correction to others. Alt F4 closes the active application, which is often the same as closing the active window. But in Word, for example, Ctrl F4 will close the active document while Alt F4 will close Word. Ctrl Shift Esc opens the Task Manager. Ctrl Tab and Ctrl Shift Tab moves forward/backward through tables. Pause displays the System Properties D minimizes all applications AND D again restores them all as they were, unless you open something in between. In many apps Ctrl Home and Ctrl End takes you to the beginning or end of a document. In a browser scrolls down one page. I'm sure a million others I'm forgetting. I guess I should start a document 🙂

Someone already mentioned it, but I love Windows D as well to minimize everything. Also love CTRL clicklink which opens link in new Firefox tab. And your whole post showed up via my reader. Have a great weekend!

I use a system tray application called "The Wonderful Icon" (http://www.thewonderfulicon.com/)that lets me define my own keyboard shortcuts, and so far seems to override all other system shortcuts (on Windows 2000). It's gotten me hooked on some dandy shortcuts like Ctrl+M (minimize window), Ctrl+Alt+M (minimize all windows), Alt+Up & Alt+Down for volume controls, Ctrl+Shift+H to hide desktop icons, and a whole bunch of hotkey commands for launching programs. It has a minimal memory footprint, and more features than you can shake a memory stick at.

When browsing with Internet Explorer (I know, I know) I like to use the Ctrl T to open a new tab, and sometimes the Ctrl N opens an entire new window with the same page you are on, plus any past browser history for that session. Have not been able to figure out if a key exists for opening a new tab with all the history yet… anyone know that one? Another oldie but goodie is F6 to get into the URL field, type the word and hit Ctrl Enter to add the www and the .com to the site you want. When editing text, I like to use the Ctrl either left or right arrows to quickly navigate through to the front of each word. I also like Ctrl Backspace when I type a wrong word and need to just start that one over by deleting it. Ctrl Shift left or right arrow selects the word for copying and pasting purposes. M$ key E gives a new window to browse the computer you are on. One last one… Ctrl A to select all text in a field to paste into word for spell check so you don't look like an idiot to Tim's 20,000 readers 🙂 Wow, after seeing all this what a big nerd I am! Have a great weekend Tim and all! E

I am a big fan of the "Find as you type" in Firefox. Tools > Options> Adavanced Tab> General> check the box for "Search for text when I start typing"

One feature of Mac OSX that saves me loads of time is Expose. For those that don't know it fans out all your open windows so you can see them all and quickly choose the one you want to go to. This works so much faster than tabbing for me. I know there are Windows apps that do this and I know Vista tried something like it but I haven't used it. The only downside is when I find myself on a comp without it I feel crippled, I actually have to find the window I want.

Type a domain in the address bar, and press CTRL-Enter to prepend "http://www." and append ".com"

Windows-E: Pop open a file explorer window Windows-L: Screen lock your computer

I have to say I'm a heavy user of the ctrl c for copy, ctrl v for paste, ctrl x for cut, and ctrl a to select all.

Here's a new one to me that I find extremely cool. GET TO YOUR FAVORITE SITES FAST When you create some favorite bookmarks in Firefox, you can then go up to Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks and then select the ones you use a lot, right-click, select Properties and give it a Keyword (ideally just a letter or two). From then on, all you have to do is go to the address bar, type in the code letter(s) and hit Enter and it takes you right to that site. For example, I have "4h" as my keyword for this blog. All I type in is 4h and hit enter — and I'm here.

The shortcuts in firefox mentioned in a previous post work very nicely with the del.icio.us plugin as well. You just add as a tag "shortcut:keyword" and then it will work any where you have del.icio.us installed. (Del.icio.us will actually display this as a keyword with it's own text field in the editor if you go back and and edit the bookmark) Plus, searching your tags for shortcut will give you a handy list of all the shortcuts you have set up.

The most used shortcut I use is – Mac OS X – CMD shift 4, this opens up a quick screen grab tool that allows you to select the area you want to copy then drops the image right onto your desktop! Ciao!

My biggest computer shortcut tip would be: Get a Mac. They're much less prone to problems, such as viruses and faulty Microsoft software! You can just get a lot more work done, and spend a lot less time tracking down problems and dealing with shortcomings. Plus, you won't need an extra program to define your own shortcuts – Macs come with that ability built in. That said, most of these keyboard shortcuts are similar on a Mac. For example, in the Safari web browser (which comes with a Mac), to get to a domain name fast you just type in "google" and it goes ahead and adds the www and .com and stuff for you. No shortcut needed. You also really want TextExpander. I can type the letter k, the letter r, and hit TAB, and it signs my email Kindest Regards, Raymond for me. I have tons of these little shortcuts, and according to the software, it saves me about 30 hours a year!

Congratulations on your book being mentioned at Davos! I saw this summary today: http://www.weforum.org/en/knowledge/Events/2008/KN_SESS_SUMM_22341?url=/en/knowledge/Events/2008/KN_SESS_SUMM_22341 This is at the end: "With all that is happening, the way people relate to work has not changed. It is still a source of income, personal dignity, family stability and social peace. Work does not just consist of production, but the other issues are not as important to business. The new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, is an interesting perspective and very popular in business schools." ### Wow, that is awesome! Davos is one of the few events I've wanted to attend for some time. Glad to see I'm partially there in spirit 🙂 Thanks so much for the heads up, Sam! All the best, Tim

My favorite: Enter only the name of the site (less the "www" and ".com") and then hit Ctrl Enter. Doing so automatically adds the "http://www." and ".com" to site name. To my knowledge…this only works for .com domains.

Other than "Cmd Q" (quit!!), I pick… Shift Rt Arrow – highlights text (for deletion–critical on laptop with no forward delete key) Cmd Shift D – in Mail.app, sends (huge uptick in time saved!) Opt Cmd spacebar – launch Quicksilver 🙂 (Full post displaying in Bloglines.)

Some useful shortcuts for cut, copy and paste: control-x: cut control-c: copy control-v: paste These are much quicker than selecting the commands from the "file" menu with a mouse. These commands work in both word processors and the windows file manager.

I often use the Firefox shortcut Ctl-[#], where #s 1-8 move you between your first 8 open tabs, and 9 takes you to your last open tabs. I'm a tab-addict, often having 20 or 30 tabs open at a time when I'm doing research or a marathon browsing session, so it's a useful feature. Keep up the great work Tim!!

For Mac power users, aside from all of the great keyboard shortcuts that are available in the OS, there is one must-have app – Quicksilver. Ascommunicatrix alluded to it is THE single tool that allows you to do more in less time without even thinking about it by giving you adaptive keyboard commands (it learns your habits) to launch apps, move files, email people, and much much more. You'll hardly touch your mouse when you use it. It's an app thats hard to describe but once you start using it and you get used to it, it's very difficult to be without it. You just have to try it and you'll understand. Remember, it's Mac only, and there isn't anything comparable on windows.

On a mac, you can download Quicksilver and launch programs via "CMD Space" and just type in the name of the program! I think windows has a similar clone. BTW, I've read that bench presses are bad for you because you are resting on your back. What are your thoughts? especially since you do sports that require a strong back: MMA, motorcycles?

Hey Tim, not sure if it was a mistake but you left out the (Shift) # to delete a message in Gmail. Cheers, Alan ### Good call. I guess I assumed that you need to press Shift to display the "3" as a "#" but it isn't clear. Thanks! Tim

Bench pressing 4x body weight? Big deal. For me that would be…. calculating…. 928 pounds. Yeah, I could do that. Sure. No problem. Remarkable athletic achievement!

Interesting Post, and in regards to the powerlifting—that was awesome!

Whole post displayed in RSS.

On Windows: Alt Space C closes the current window, I find this easier to do that alt f4 because the keys are grouped close together In Windows Explorer going through files or folders, instead of visually scanning the list to find a folder to click on you can just type the first couple letters of the folder name to hop right to it. As a geek I use Windows R a lot to open the 'Run' dialog where I'll then type stuff like 'cmd', 'notepad', 'msconfig', 'services.msc', 'compmgmt.msc'

I use Photoshop a lot, and my favorite shortcut is Cmd-Z. But what's really great is the Actions palette, which let's you set up a whole series of functions that your computer will automatically run on an image, or a batch of images, and you can choose which keyboard shortcut to assign it to. Now that's automation!

My favorite shortcut for Firefox is Shift-Ctrl-T–it REOPENS the last tab you closed. Perfect for people like me who close things without thinking, then say "oh sh*t…I wanted that" For Gmail, there is a Firefox extension called Better Gmail that provides a ton of additional keyboard shortcuts on top of the ones that are already in Gmail. It's a must!

You're wrong about Firefox my friend. It's cetainly not faster (or easier)…and I dumped it and returned to IE after I got a virus. Here's something a bit more informed on browser security than you seem to be: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=915 Either way, what's the point of being so proud of learning windows shortcuts and then treating the browser as if it weren't a logical extension of that? Stick with IE.

Oh dear, you've teased out my closet geek obsession: shortcut keys. "(Hint: just type in the name of a company or person — no 'www' or '.com' — and hit enter to find their website, if it exists)" Well, that way initiates a search, which can be slow for uncommon URLs. You can force Firefox to bracket "www." and ".com" around a known domain by typing the domain in the address bar followed by Ctrl | Enter. So typing "fourhourworkweek" followed by Ctrl | Enter becomes "www.fourhourworkweek.com" Following the domain name with Shift | Ctrl | Enter appends ".org" instead of ".com". Shift | Alt | Enter appends ".net". Ctrl | T opens a new tab in Firefox (though you may have to change a setting in Tools | Options | Tabs); Ctrl | W closes the current tab. Ctrl | Page Up and Ctrl | Page Down shifts the current focus to the tab immediately right or left, respectively. Now for a real Firefox Ninja tip — keyword bookmarks: If you right click a bookmark and open its Properties, note the "Keyword" field. You can put the keyword of your choice in this field, and you can then use this keyword in the address bar instead of a URL. I generally use 2-character mnemonics: "4h" for fourhourworkweek.com, "gm" for Gmail, "gr" for Google Reader, "lh" for Lifehacker, etc. So any frequently visited site is a couple of keystrokes away: Ctrl | L for the address bar, followed by the 2-character keyword bookmark, then "Enter: the whole sequence takes about 1 second once it's routine.

@Michael, Sorry, I missed your post, and didn't realize you suggested the keyword bookmark as well. We both use 4h for this site!

After using Ctrl K to enter a search, pressing Alt Enter will open the search results in a new tab (in Firefox, not sure about IE or Opera).

Tim, you've barely hit the tip of the iceberg! For the rest of the iceberg: Quicksilver (for Mac): http://blacktree.com/projects/quicksilver.html I don't use a PC (ahhemmm) but I hear that there is a Quicksilver-like product called "Launchy" for the PC. Once you use a product like these, you won't believe you wasted so much time with mere keyboard shortcuts!

I'm going to be posting my top 10 shortkeys for macs/OS X tomorrow. I think the world is started to moving exponentially towards these advanced machines. Jose

Tim, a lot of your blog articles display wrongly on my computer. I use Mac- which could be the reason? For example, on the "Not-to-do list: 9 habits…", one of the paragraph reads: The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates—doing more—it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life. A lot of these †are scattered around, and although I can make sense of it, it is quite distracting. Perhaps someone in Bangalore or Manila can fix this? Keep up the good work, you have changed my perspective forever. I owe you big time. Many thanks, Daniele ### Hi Daniele, Thanks for this reminder. I know about this, as I'm using a Mac these days, and this error drives me nuts. I am completely unsure of why this is happening, as the " and so on (perhaps that just displayed incorrectly? Should be a quotation mark) appeared perfectly initially. I'll check it out again. Anyone out there have ideas on how to fix the source of this, not just go in manually and change the odd substitutions? Thanks! Tim

Among my favorites that haven't been mentioned yet are Ctrl-p to print and ctrl-s to save a file.

I strongly second Jen's comment above about TextExpander. The single most useful tool on OS X, I think. The trick is to really study what you repeat when you're writing, and turn them into shortcuts. Long words, sentence fragments, sentences, paragraphs or entire page-long blocks of 'boiler plate' can be saved as tiny shortcuts, so typing 'iurl' expands to http://www.instarmusic.com or whatever. This one app bridges the gap between the Ferrisy 'magic auto-reply' and having to write custom-crafted emails. Many communications for me are similar,but with a few mods – so using TextExpander shortcuts give you a tool-kit of frequently used text elements to build a quick email. Some types of communications are better when crushed down to 5 sentences, but lots aren't (i.e. 'tell me about your products' or 'tell me about your band'). This tool lets you provide lots of content in your messages without the slog of typing it all. Second minor tip on OS X – almost nobody I know enables multi-finger dragging on their trackpad – it's awesome! You can scroll down web-pages, or 'pan' left to right by putting two fingers down instead of one. This trackpad feature is so handy I loathe using a mouse now. – Karl

Whoops, I meant 'Jed', not Jen.

I have one more: this is more of a Google tip than a keyboard shortcut. Tip: include the word of a site you want to search along with your keywords in your google queries – that way, you can skip going to the site in question to start your search. You 'focus' the search by including the domain. Example: If you want to search,say, Craigslist listings for a particular product you could go to Craigslist and do a search as usual. OR, you could just enter a Google search for "craigslist gretch guitar" and you'll get the same results in a single step. The results are better in fact because the search is across multiple craigslist sites. Same logic applies to Ebay, Flickr, etc. Very handy.

Speaking of the rest of us. Tim, what are you thoughts on everything produced from the tech community. Personally I think that the rest of us could use some deeper insight into many of the assumptions made by those deemed "techies"! If only they required techies to take advanced writing and journalism, we might all be "techies". Great post! regards, Part rest of us, part Techie

Off Topic, but quick question: Do I remember a comment in your book about Vertical Systems International? (aka VSI | Dave West). Please ignore this comment if I am mistaken. If I am correct, I just found it coincidental that I discovered both your book and VSI in the same week… VSI/Dave lives 3 doors down from me. Dave died suddenly of a heart attack last week. Condolences to anyone who knew him. Tanya

Tim, you haven't scratched the surface! If you're on a PC, try activewords ( http://www.activewords.com/ ) It just might change your life! The system uses keywords, that you can type anywhere, in any application, and activate automatically or using a special hotkey of your own choosing. You can get a 60-day free trial to the program, which can launch websites, insert replacement text (including entire letters) pull up applications, browse to folders and open documents. There's even a handy calculator that makes an approximation of how much you've saved based on your use of keywords. The license lets you install it on every PC you own, and there's even a handwriting tool for use with tablet PCs. I'm just a customer, but as you can tell, I'm a convert, too. Regards Matt

Not a keyboard shortcut but related to Firefox/Gmail: Google calendar, while a wonderful program is web based so it doesn't work offline, right? Wrong. Thunderbird (Firefox's email client cousin) has a calendar component available called Lightning available at: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/ Add to this a plugin to download and upload your Google Calendar data (so any updates done via the web go to your local calendar and vice versa) and you can now use your Google calendar offline (you will need to connect periodically to synchronize it of course). Provider for Google Calendar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631 A tutorial on setting this up is available here: http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239 And you can of course include other calendars that are shared with you, thus you can see your calendar and coworkers, online and offline!

Tim, Individual keyboard shortcuts are great ways to save time. You can also go one step more and string together sets of keyboard shortcuts to do entire routines like sending a message without ever touching the mouse. I've pulled together a set of routines for doing things like sending messages and creating appointments or tasks, along with a large collection of individual Outlook keyboard shortcuts at: http://www.living-with-outlook.com/keyboard-shortcuts-to-send-mail.html –Bill

The post showed up fine in my rss reader (thunderbird) Here is my list of favorite shortcut keys: alt-tab: switch between open applications shift-alt-tab: switch in reverse order ctrl-tab in navigator: switch between tabs windows r: open run box windows m: show desktop Enjoy 😉

Hi Tim, I have read only your first chapter (and I am Dutch by the way), and one of my first assignments is to contact you (being part of celebitry in the meantime with 99% chance of little social contact with normal people like me), as I thought I could read all the other chapters, but why should I if instead you and I can meet (during some sailing or other non-working related activity) and share your views with mine – as this will further enrich your life, as it probably does mine? Wim Gommeren – Zaandam – Netherlands (Office work, lot's of travelling but good paid)

Hi Tim, I just wanted to say THANK YOU for writing The 4-Hour Workweek. I can't thank you enough for it. The only thing I implemented so far is the email autoresponder. That was the most liberating feeling I experienced in years. That is, after I got over the hard part of forcing myself not to check email. I’m reading your book for the second time and I've decided to do an experiment: follow your advice in the book word for word. I figure the worst thing that could happen to me won't be any worse than what I’ve already experienced so I really don't have anything to lose. I plan on logging my escapades on a website. I’ll post the reactions, results, etc. to everything I implement or try. I graduated from Columbia University–in New York City–in May with a degree in philosophy (focus on Tibetan Buddhism) and currently I work in digital media production for a prestigious TV channel. The exposure's been great but after a month, I conquered the learning curve and they can't offer me anything more advanced at this time. Not only am I extremely bored and find my job utterly meaningless, but I absolutely can't stand the 9-5 slavestyle (I call it slavestyle because it's not my idea of a lifestyle). I’m going bonkers after 7 years of having had relative control over my schedule while being in school. Working at the TV channel 9-5 has driven me to the brink of suicide (well, almost). Objectively, for a 9-5 life, I have the creme de la creme of jobs given the industry and department. I sometimes wish that I could just be happy being a slave in the system like everyone else. But, I haven't been successful in conforming myself so I finally decided to face my fears and make another major life change. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to visit every country and territory in the world (including outer space) so that's what I’ll do: trip around the world and fly into outer space on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic–or go up with the Russians or one way or another, experience outer space. At the moment, my plans consist of getting rid of as many material possessions as possible, storing the rest in a few bins in my brother's basement, living in airport business lounges (since my AMEX gives me access) when I’m broke and need a roof and food, creating a sufficient remote cash flow to finance my dream life (how exactly I’ll do that, I have no clue), and doing all the other things I’ve always wanted to do. That’ll include picking up more languages, continuing to train for amateur boxing competitions (with the goal of turning pro), stunt flying (I got my pilot’s license when I was 18), skydiving, and enjoying life, etc. I’m giving myself 3 months to hit the road. To people not like me, this sounds crazy (“What the #&%^$#! You’re throwing away your glamorous job at XYZ channel!????!!!???”) but I’m a crazy person and this has me more psyched than anything since graduating. Or in years and years, for that matter. It’s an adventure almost on par with escaping the Amish. In your book, you occasionally mention doing case studies on people and mentoring people. Would you mentor me in this adventure? I’d be forever grateful and happily split whatever profit I make from it. (There’s GOTTA be a way to generate cash flow from this adventure but I have the absolute worst karma in history when it comes to money so maybe you could steer me in the right direction?) In addition, I’ll introduce you to the inside life of the Amish and even teach you the Amish language if you’d like. I know you can experience basically whatever you want in the world but I doubt you’ve experienced Amish culture from the inside. I escaped when I was 15. I’m the oldest of 11, a female and from a small community. It was no easy thing to orchestrate a successful departure, one that I planned for over 4 years from the time I was 11. Where I’m at currently is not where I want to be. I didn’t leave the Amish and bust my butt to get an Ivy League education and experience what little of the world I have experienced just to end up stuck and miserable in another robotic Fritz Langian Metropolistic system. I’ve had and have a wonderful life by the average American’s standards–experiencing things that make even my financially wealthy friends envious–but it’s still not satisfactory. I want to truly live. I want to be free. Here’s my contact info: [removed] If you’re not interested in mentoring me, would you be willing to recommend me to someone else? I would very much welcome any feedback, advice or suggestions you have regarding my leap into the unknown. Thank your for your consideration and again, thanks a million for writing this book. It’s good to know that I’m not the only insane sane person out there. Sincerely, Torah ### Hi Torah, I unfortunately don't do any mentoring or coaching at the moment due to sheer volume, but I am interested in the Amish. To be continued… Thanks so much for sharing, Tim

People have mentioned Firefox bookmark keywords, but I don't think anyone has mentioned Smart Keywords(http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html). In any text input box used for searching you can right-click and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search…" After creating the smart keyword, you can use it in the location bar to do your search rather than having to go to the site first. For example, if you create a smart keyword called "amazon" for Amazon.com's search input box, then you can just type "amazon Ferriss" in the browser's URL location bar to search Amazon.com for Tim's book. This is really useful for sites you might search regularly, such as amazon, IMDB, eBay, etc.

It's awesome to so many useful tips and tricks for windows. In windows you can switch between different programs with the alt tab which we've covered. With a Mac you can do apple tab to switch within programs, BUT you can also do apple ` which switches between windows of the same program. This can save a ton of time with multiple windows of multiple programs open. I think Quicksilver is an amazing time saver for Mac system. http://www.blacktree.com/ If you want to go beyond shortcuts to specific productivity issues you might want a technology coach. Seth Godin mentioned this in his blog. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/a-shortage-of-d.html

Not a keyboard shortcut but I simply can't use a mouse without a middle button anymore: – opens links in a new tab – closes tab / windows also for they keyboard: start m to go to the desktop

AH!!!!! Heres something that makes your MAC run faster. I did this while i was getting some tutoring from a mac Genius. Go to utilities and then to go to disk utility and then hit verify permission. This basically takes 2 mins and is the equivalent of defragmenting on your apple. Jose

Tim- Re: weird characters showing up. I assume you're using a different program to write up drafts of your posts, and then copy/pasting? I've had this happen before when a word processing program uses "fancier" characters (such as opening/closing quotes instead of the plain ol' tick marks, or proper "em" dashes, etc). You can still display those on your site, but they have to be replaced with special little codes. From a great little article at A List Apart: "Don’t ever trust the 8-bit representations to be correct, because they almost certainly won’t be. The biggest problem is that many web browsers assume that 8-bit characters refer to the local character system, translating your curly quotes or dashes into Greek or accented Latin characters on other platforms." http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/ (scroll down to "Newspapers of (broken) record")

You may wish to use capital R (Shift R) and capital C (Shift C) in gmail to compose a new message in a new window. Might be useful to some.

For those of you using the "slow" ctrl-f for searching, try "/" instead. I dislike the search-when-i-type-automatically, since sometimes I am trying to type in a field, and miss the focus (or the site purposely directs me elsewhere, even worse) and then the page starts scrolling around since it thought I was searching. For those of you without a middle button, you can use ctrl-click to open a new tab in firefox. (I think that works without an extension, though I always have tab mix plus installed – it comes with an insane amount of customization if you like that sort of thing). Thanks for the tip on ctrl-shift-t, I am shortcut weenie, and that was the only shortcut given here that I don't use. Very nice.

A great little Windows program called ShortKeys www.shortkeys.com allows you to create shortcuts that apply across all applications. For example, 4 keystrokes to enter my email address anywhere instead of 26 – this is a program I wouldn't be without. There's a free version, but I've used the paid version at $19.95 for years. My favorite shortcut in Word is the F4 key. It repeats your last action – whether as simple as applying text formatting, cutting text, or implementing a series of actions like selecting table rows, changing font size, color, adding borders – the one F4 stroke applies the whole series of actions. Great post and comments!

nice entry, Alt the left and right cursor keys works well for going forward and back to webpages in FF. it looks like shift plus rolling the mouse will does the same thing. thanks for the tips everyone.

One of the little known shortcuts (even for nerds) I use regularly are bookmark keywords (in Firefox) and strategically named favorites in IE. In Firefox, when you create a bookmark, you can enter a keyword for easy access. For example, when you bookmark http://fourhourworkweek.com/blog you can set its keyword to be 'tim'. Next time you use Ctrl L to get to the location bar you can just type 'tim' and the browser will load the Four Hour Work Week blog. The really lesser known incarnation of this is in IE. You can add the site to your favorites, which will give it a name based on the title of the page, then rename the favorite to be 'tim'. Next time you type tim in the location bar, IE will look first in your favorites for a bookmark named tim and load it if found.

one short cut I use all the time is ctrl shift esc for windows.

If you need to commonly do things on your computer that don't come with built in shortcuts, you can try out a program called Direct Access from Nagarsoft (http://www.nagarsoft.com/). The program lets you assign your own shortcuts to various actions including replacing text and starting applications. The interesting part is that you can type the keys into any application that takes keystrokes and then hit your hotkey and it will do what you told it. I bought the program over a year ago and I couldn't be happier. Disclaimer: I am not associated with this product or company, other than having purchased it and sent some emails back and forth with the owner (I'm also a programmer, so we talked about programming).

y'all have covered most of the standard keyboard shortcuts, but if you wanna increase your character's ninja powes even more, gotta learn vim and FF's vim addon: vimperator. learning curve is significant, but time saved down the road is much more significant.

dear sir , as i want to ask you as a questions regarding the shortcuts key ab- out the computer for the general purpose only which i can't use my hands to my mouse respectively………………..????

ctrl+p, f3, shift+ arrows, ctrl+a

hi, how r u? this shortcut really helped me and let me tell u that my favorite shorcut is shuding down the computer which double press on windows key then a press on u. I have a request from u to sent lots of useful shortcut in my email add, please.

I am a keyboard junkie, and always trying to find new, helpful keyboard shortcuts. Many good ones were mentioned here. One I don't think I saw mentioned, that is one of my faves, is ALT+SPACEBAR+X, which maximizes the selected window. Also, the often-ignored Run dialog (opened via WINDOWS+R). A great way to use this dialog to its full potential is to make your own run commands. What you do is make a shortcut to the item you want to open (a program, directory, whatever). Then rename the shortcut to what you want to type in the run dialog to launch it. All you have to do is put the shortcut in C:Windows and you're done. Open the Run dialog and type the name of the shortcut, and off it goes!

I use my own custom-defined emacs-like text-editing keyboard shortcuts in all cocoa apps. And I navigate among interface elements, tabs, windows, apps, desktops, etc. – all with my keyboard. I'm obsessed with interfaces that don't torture me. I've tried all Windows interfaces, several linux window managers, and Sun. OS X lets me get more stuff done. And it only took me a few weeks to become a keyboard ninja in OS X because it is well designed.

Ctrl-F. Lets you find any word or phrase in a web page or document.

all such shortcuts are now known by almost everyone plz update ur list

Hi friend(s), I have a document saved in my pc which is all typed in small and capital letters both….I want them all to be converted into Capital letters only…So please tell me the trick for it…Thank You

i am very thankful for you for your short keys

I love learning & discovering new PC keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard Shortcuts make my PC work more simple & quick.

@Kurt Seifried-Taylor Your post sounds very interesting but the third link you posted about the tutorial is broken. Where can I find another tutorial? with regards John

Apple fanboy ^ I don't care if you aren't smart about your money. Let me have a windows pc with variety, simplicity, and smoothness. I have been using a pc for decades and haven't caught any viruses. And not to mention that Macs also freeze, crash and get viruses.

@ VaibhaV It's quite easy .Follow the given steps: 1. Open the required document. 2. Then select all text area to be capitalised 3. Then press Ctrl+Shift+A. After this your work must be done…….

It's not CTRL, it's COMMAND + Tab #