Computer Shortcuts to Speed Up Production
Tags: productivity
Published: 2020-04-12 18:35:34

Weather you are a normal everyday computer user or you are writing code 10 hours a day there are simple computer shortcuts that can either speed up your production or just make it easier.

As an avid computer hobbyist for over 20 years now, I did not find most of these shortcuts to really help me until about 10 years ago.  At first they seem to take up more time getting used to them than they were really beneficial, but when you start to implement several together they all add up and you see a difference.

For the most part there are numerous shortcuts that are implemented cross platform.  And by cross platform for me I mean from Windows to Linux along with the programs that are ran in them.  I personally am not a Mac guy, by enlarge due to Linux.  If I feel the need to run a Mac specifically, I save some money and run Linux.  But most of these apply to Mac's using the command key.  

Some of the basic and very common examples are:

```Ctrl + c  to cut
Ctrl + f   find or search for something
Ctrl + o   open a file
Ctrl + v  to paste
Ctrl + p  to print 
Ctrl + s  to save
Ctrl + Shift + s   to save as
Alt + Tab   to scroll windows forward
Alt + Shift + Tab   to scroll windows backward```

Now you have some that are more program specific.  What I am finding out while learning to code is that I am having to switch browser tabs or browser windows to research the things that I am trying to create.  Some of the shortcuts within Chrome (since most dev's use Chrome) are:

```Ctrl + Tab   to scroll tabs forward
Ctrl + Shift +Tab   to scroll tabs backward
Ctrl + n   to open a new window
Ctrl + Shift + n   open a new Incognito window
Ctrl + t   to open a new tab and go to it
Ctrl + e or k  to go to the search bar```

Another one that I use quite a bit in Chrome is Alt key.  When you see that you have a spelling mistake (shown by a red underlined squiggly), all you have to do is hover over the word and press the Alt key and left click your mouse and it will give you suggestions.  This is very handy when I know what I want to say and there are multiple spellings of a word  but I am not sure exactly which one I should use.

Just the the cut and paste while writing can be huge.  How I implement my shortcuts is I have a main window open in Chrome that I work on.  Then I open another window to do my research, even though I love my tab browsing and usually have about a dozen tabs open at any given time.  I do this because it is easier for me to hit Alt + Tab to jump back and forth between windows than than Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go back and forth in tabs.  Basically it is due to the number of keys needed to be pressed, which is only two as opposed to remembering to use three keys to go back.

Some more convenient ones that might not be used as often are:

```Ctrl + d   adds a bookmark
Ctrl + h   opens history
Ctrl + j   opens downloads
Ctrl + Shift + o   opens bookmarks
Ctrl + w   closes current tab and take you to the last one
Ctrl + u   view source in a full page```

While writing this article I found a couple more shortcuts that I was not aware of that I will be using more in the future.  Just to sit down and try some of these out might be a big time saver for you .

Doing a Google's search you can find shortcuts for anything.  I thought I would just put this together to show there are some very useful ones that are worth trying out.