Windows 7 introduced several shortcuts that were unavailable on previous versions of Windows. While the operating system has been around for five years now many users are still unaware of these useful tricks. Here are several pro shortcuts that everyone should know about.
Folder shortcuts
Shift- Ctrl-N : This combination creates a new folder, whatever Explorer window you may be in.
Alt-Up : When you’re in a folder, pressing the Alt-Up key combination will take you one level up. While it would be nice to have an Alt-Down shortcut, it wouldn’t make sense — while there’s always only one way to go up in any folder, you may have more than one subfolder to drill down into. Windows wouldn’t know which way to go lower down if you held down the Alt and Down keys.
Shift-Right-Click: If you have a folder or file before you, and would like to know what its path is (in Windows, a path for a file or folder is the detailed address of the location that it occupies), the Shift-Right-Click keyboard shortcut gives you a special menu with a Copy as path option. This right-click menu also gives you the option to open a command prompt window with the cursor pointing to the folder that you’re in at the moment.
Win-(+) : While browsers have long had Ctrl-(+) and Ctrl-(-) shortcuts to zoom into web pages or out, Windows Explorer itself has had nothing. Now, though, you do have it – with the Win-(+) and Win-(-) shortcuts. It doesn’t give you as fine a level of control as you do with browsers, though – you simply get to magnify your folder greatly or bring it back to normal.
Other shortcuts
Double-clicking a window border: Whether it’s an Explorer window or a program window, double-clicking on the top or bottom borders snaps the window to full vertical size. This feature can also be accessed by simply vertically resizing a window all the way to the top of the screen. Dragging a window all the way to the top maximizes it, too — so that it occupies the entire screen.
Win+G : If you’d like a shortcut to help you turn the Windows Gadgets on your screen on or off, the Win+G shortcut does it for you.
Finally, the Shake feature in Windows 7 is a fun touch to an otherwise serious operating system. If you’d like to minimize everything but the window that you’re currently on, you simply need to click on the title bar and shake the window back and forth. Windows will minimize everything else.
