For those craving keyboard efficiency morsels

Published 26 September 07 12:17 AM | jamesbl 

Often times when delivering a training class, while browsing around in Explorer, I will hit a particular keystroke which almost always elicits conversation from my students who are paying close attention... I am not sure why, but it appears to be a little known keyboard shortcut that I use quite often that is the center of the conversation.

Consider the following example of a listview which contains items that we really want to see, but the shell doesn't want us to see completely for some reason:

Before holding down CTRL and pressing + on the numpad

From here, all we can tell is there are two files that currently look exactly alike.  Bummer.

Now for the coolness.  While holding the CTRL key down, press the + sign on the numpad (or for you laptop users, the numpad equivalent of CTRL + Fn + / ).

After holding down CTRL and pressing + on the numpad

As you can see, *all* columns are appropriately sized in one swift keyboard move.

Another one of my favorite morsels as a lefty is CTRL+INSERT for Copy and SHIFT+INSERT for Paste.  No need to remove your left hand from that mouse...except in the Outlook reading pane...ugh.

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# Techy News Blog » For those craving keyboard efficiency morsels said on September 25, 2007 7:23 PM:

PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=2912

# Andrew Connell [MVP MOSS] said on September 26, 2007 8:35 AM:

Learning something new every day!

# Mirrored Blogs said on September 26, 2007 9:05 AM:

[via Thoughts about IIS (and now SharePoint) ] One of the aspects I love about teaching development classes

# ccatto said on September 26, 2007 10:02 AM:

Hey Now,

Nice Post, I love keyboard shortcuts, I never new these. Found your post threw a link on AC's blog. From a fellow lefty, I use a left mouse often & the copy & paste is really nice to know instead of the classic cntl+c & cntl+v!

Thx for the info,

Catto

# jamesbl said on September 28, 2007 12:53 AM:

Another somewhat cool set of shortcuts is * and - (again, on the numpad) from an Explorer view.  * will expand ALL subdirectories under the currently selected subdirectory in an explorer treeview.  I highly suggest NOT doing it when you have your c:\ root selected, or you will be there quite a while.  - will collapse it.

# jamesbl said on September 28, 2007 6:29 PM:

ok one more for now... have you ever been in a command prompt and wanted to jump into an explorer window in that same directory?

Type "start ." and hit enter.

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