Windows

Using Windows without a mouse

Posted on by John

Why would you not want to use your mouse? Some tasks are most efficiently done with a mouse, but others can be done more efficiently with the keyboard.The problem isn’t so much using a mouse versus using a keyboard but rather the time it takes to switch between the two modes. Particularly when using a laptop with a touchpad, it’s faster to use the keyboard.

Why does it even matter? So what if you save a few seconds here and there? It’s a matter of keeping up with your thoughts. Suppose some series of tasks takes 20 seconds with a mouse but you can accomplish the same tasks in 12 seconds using the keyboard. The big deal isn’t that you’ve saved 8 seconds; the big deal is that you’re more likely to finish your tasks before you lose the thought that motivated them.

The same could be said for learning to type more quickly. Typing 20% faster doesn’t directly make you 20% more productive unless you’re a professional typist. The benefit is that your fingers can come closer to keeping up with your brain.

If you’d like to get in the habit of using your keyboard more and your mouse less, you may find this helpful. I’ve created a Twitter account for posting one tip per day on using Windows without a mouse. If you’d like to follow using Twitter, it’s @SansMouse. If you don’t use Twitter, you could subscribe via RSS. I’ve written a few dozen tips so far and they’re in a queue to be dribbled one per day. You could practice one simple tip per day until it is natural to use your mouse much less.

I use my mouse fairly often, though I’m trying to get into the habit of using it less. I’ve recently become persuaded that it’s worthwhile to use the keyboard more and that it doesn’t take that much effort.

Related post: Four patterns in Windows keyboard shortcuts

Four patterns in Windows keyboard shortcuts

Posted on by John

Here are four patterns for organizing the most common keyboard shortcuts for Windows. First I’ll list the patterns, then I’ll give some qualifications and elaborate on the patterns.

  1. Keyboard shortcuts involving letters are all of the form Control-<letter> or Windows-<letter>.
  2. The letters used in Control shortcuts and Windows shortcuts don’t overlap.
  3. Control in combination with navigation keys moves the cursor. Shift in combination with navigation keys makes a selection.
  4. The Tab key cycles through things. What the key cycles through depends on what it is paired with.

When I say Control-<letter> I refer to shortcuts such as Control-C, holding down the Control key and pressing C in order to copy something. When I say Windows-<letter> I refer to holding down the Windows logo key in and pressing some letter.

My goal here is to stick to the most common shortcuts, ones that work across several versions of Windows and with many applications. Also, I’m not including any accessibility sequences such as sticky keys etc.

Control key with letters

Here are the common Windows keyboard shortcuts of the form Control key followed by a letter.

A Select all
B Toggle bold
C Copy
F Find
G Go to
H Find and replace
I Toggle italics
N New
O Open
P Print
S Save
U Toggle underlining
V Paste
W Close document
X Cut
Y Redo
Z Undo

Windows key with letters

Here are the common shortcuts using the Windows key with a letter.

D Show desktop
E Open file explorer
F Find
L Lock computer
M Minimize all windows
R Run command

Exceptions

There is one common shortcut that uses a letter and more than just the Control key or Windows key: the combination Windows-Shift-M maximizes all minimized windows. But there are no common shortcuts of the form Alt-<letter> or Control-Shift-<letter> etc.

F is the only letter used with both the Control key and the Windows key. In both cases the command finds something. Control-F finds text within a file and Windows-F searches across directories.

Navigation keys

All the navigation key shortcuts come in pairs.

Control-Home moves the cursor to the top of a document; Control-End moves the cursor to the end.

Control-Left Arrow moves the cursor to the left one word; Control-Right Arrow moves the cursor to the right one word.

Control-Up Arrow moves the cursor up a paragraph; Control-Down Arrow moves the cursor down a paragraph.

Control-Shift-Home selects from the top of the document to the cursor location; Control-Shift-End selects from the current location to the bottom of the document.

Control-Shift-Left Arrow selects one word to the left; Control-Shift-Right Arrow selects one word to the right.

Shift-Left-Arrow expands the selection one character to the left; Shift-Right-Arrow expands the selection one character to the right.

Shift-Up-Arrow selects one line up; Shift-Down-Arrow selects one line down.

Tabbing

The Tab key alone moves the focus in a window, cycling through the controls in the order specified by the application.

Control-Tab cycles through tabs or through windows in an application with multiple windows.

Alt-Tab cycles through running applications.

Windows-Tab cycles through the Task Bar.

Adding the Shift key to any of the above key reverses the cycle order. For example, Alt-Shift-Tab cycles through applications in the opposite order of Alt-Tab.

Miscellaneous shortcuts

Most common Windows keyboard shortcuts are listed above. However, there are several shortcuts that are commonly used but do not fall into a regular pattern. Some of these shortcuts are listed below.

  • Shift-F10 brings up a properties dialog, just like right-clicking.
  • Shift-Delete permanently deletes a file, bypassing the recycle bin.
  • Alt-F4 closes the active window or opens the shutdown dialog if there is no active window.
  • Alt-Down Arrow opens a drop down list box.
  • Alt-Print Screen grabs an image of the active window rather than the entire screen.
  • Alt-Space opens the current window’s system menu.
  • Windows-Pause brings up the System Properties dialog.

Most of the function keys are not used often. The most commonly used function keys are

  • F1 to bring up help,
  • F5 to refresh, and
  • F10 to activate an application’s menu bar.

Related posts

PowerShell 2.0 for Windows XP etc.

Posted on by John

PowerShell version 2.0 shipped with Windows 7 and with Windows Server 2008 R2, but it only recently became available for other versions of Windows.

The release of PowerShell 2.0 has been more like a leak than a product launch. The announcement page hardly reads like an announcement. The title reads “Description of the Windows Management Framework on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.” What’s this “Windows Management Framework”? I’ve never heard of that. I just want the new PowerShell. The first time I saw this page was when someone sent me a link saying PowerShell 2.0 was available for XP. I thought they’d sent me the wrong link by mistake because I didn’t see anything about PowerShell at first. Only if you scroll down to the middle of a long page can you see links to download PowerShell.

I expected something more like the following.

PowerShell 2.0 Released

Download for your platform:

  • XP
  • Vista (32 bit, 64 bit)
  • Server 2003 (32 bit, 64 bit)
  • Server 2008 (32 bit, 64 bit)

Related links:

Simple backup software

Posted on by John

I was asking about backup software for Windows the other day and a couple people recommended Cobian Backup. It’s simple to use, but also very configurable. And it’s free.

You can have the software simply copy files or you can have it zip the output (.zip or .7z format). In either case, you don’t need the backup software in order to restore your files.

The software has all the features you’d expect. You can perform full, incremental, or differential backups. You can run backups manually or as scheduled tasks. Etc.

Adding fonts to the PowerShell and cmd.exe consoles

Posted on by John

The default font options for the PowerShell console are limited: raster fonts and Lucida Console. Raster fonts are the default, though Lucida Console is an improvement. In my opinion, Consolas is even better, but it’s not on the list of options.

Mastering PowerShell by Tobias Weltner explains how to expand the list of font options for the PowerShell console. The same trick increases the list of font options in the Windows command prompt cmd.exe as well. The book is free for download. See page 16 for details. However, I have two comments about the instructions it gives.

First, the book says “The name must be exactly the same as the official font name, just the way it’s stated under [registry key].” However, the Consolas font is listed in the registry as “Consolas (True Type)”. You should enter “Consolas” and leave out the parenthetical description.

Second, the book says “the new font will work only after you either log off at least once or restart your computer.” When I tried it, logging off was not sufficient; I had to reboot my computer before the font change would work.

Update: In order to make this post self-contained, I’ve added below the necessary information from Mastering PowerShell.

Run regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionConsoleTrueTypeFont.

Right-click in the panel on the right side and create a new string value. Name that value “0” or “00” or however many zeros you need to create a new key. That string’s value is the name of the font to add.

Update: See Necessary criteria for fonts to be available in a command window

Related posts

Manipulating the clipboard with PowerShell

Posted on by John

The PowerShell Community Extensions contain a couple handy cmdlets for working with the Windows clipboard: Get-Clipboard and Out-Clipboard. One way to use these cmdlets is to copy some text to the clipboard, munge it, and paste it somewhere else. This lets you avoid creating a temporary file just to run a script on it.

Update: Looks like

For example, occasionally I need to copy some C++ source code and paste it into HTML in a <pre> block. While <pre> turns off normal HTML formatting, special characters still need to be escaped: < and > need to be turned into &lt; and &gt; etc. I can copy the code from Visual Studio, run a script html.ps1 from PowerShell, and paste the code into my HTML editor. (I like to use Expression Web.)

The script html.ps1 looks like this.

    $a = get-clipboard;
    $a = $a -replace "&", "&amp;";
    $a = $a -replace "<", "&lt;";
    $a = $a -replace ">", "&gt;";
    $a = $a -replace '"', "&quot;"
    $a = $a -replace "'", "&#39;"
    out-clipboard $a

So this C++ code

    double& x = y;
    char c = 'k';
    string foo = "hello";
    if (p < q) ...

turns into this HTML code

    double&amp; x = y;
    char c = &#39;k&#39;;
    string foo = &quot;hello&quot;;
    if (p &lt; q) ...

Of course the PSCX clipboard cmdlets are useful for more than HTML encoding. For example, I wrote a post a few months ago about using them for a similar text manipulation problem.

If you’re going to do much text manipulation, you may want to look at these notes on regular expressions in PowerShell.

The only problem I’ve had with the PSCX clipboard cmdlets is copying formatted text. The cmdlets work as expected when copying plain text. But here’s what I got when I copied the word “snippets” from the CodeProject home page and ran Get-Clipboard:

    Version:0.9
    StartHTML:00000136
    EndHTML:00000214
    StartFragment:00000170
    EndFragment:00000178
    SourceURL:https://www.codeproject.com/
    <html><body>
    <!--StartFragment-->snippets<!--EndFragment-->
    </body>
    </html>

The Get-Clipboard cmdlet has a -Text option that you might think would copy content as text, but as far as I can tell the option does nothing. This may be addressed in a future release of PSCX.

Three ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows

Posted on by John

Won currency symbol, U+20A9

Here are three approaches to entering Unicode characters in Windows. See the next post for entering Unicode characters in Linux.

Alt – x

In Microsoft Word you can insert Unicode characters by typing the hex value of the character then typing Alt-x. You can also see the Unicode value of a character by placing the cursor immediately after the character and pressing Alt-x. This also works in applications that use the Windows rich edit control such as WordPad and Outlook.

Pros: Nothing to install or configure. You can see the numeric value before you turn it into a symbol. It’s handy to be able to go the opposite direction, looking up Unicode values for characters.

Cons: Does not work with many applications.

Alt – +

Another approach which works with more applications is as follows. First create a registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER of type REG_SZ called EnableHexNumpad, set its value to 1, and reboot. Then you can enter Unicode symbols by holding down the Alt key and typing the plus sign on the numeric keypad followed by the character value. When you release the Alt key, the symbol will appear. This approach worked with most applications I tried, including Firefox and Safari, but did not with Internet Explorer.

Pros: Works with many applications. No software to install.

Cons: Requires a registry edit and a reboot. It’s awkward to hold down the Alt key while typing several other keys. You cannot see the numbers you’re typing. Doesn’t work with every application.

UnicodeInput

Another option is to install the UnicodeInput utility. This worked with every application I tried, including Internet Explorer. Once installed, the window below pops up whenever you hold down the Alt key and type the plus sign on the numeric keypad. Type the numeric value of the character in the box, click the Send button, and the character will be inserted into the window that had focus when you clicked Alt-plus.

UnicodeInput screenshot

Pros: Works everywhere (as far as I’ve tried). The software is free. Easy to use.

Cons: Requires installing software.

Related links