Have you ever watched a person spending a ridiculous length of time dragging their mouse over a wall of text (it takes multiple tries!), right-clicking, copying it, navigating through their open program windows, and navigating through a multitude of Chrome tabs only to realize that they’ve accidentally closed the tab they needed? Then they’ll proceed to search through her browser history (after spending five minutes navigating to their browser history) for the tab they closed, and half an hour later, they successfully right-clicks and pastes the wall of text into her online word processor.
If you are this person, or if you know somebody who is this person, fear not. Keyboard shortcuts are here to help. Here are a few essential shortcuts that will help you cut down on wasted time.
Task switcher: alt+tab / ⌘+tab
This shortcut will save you a lot of trouble trying to navigate through your windows, especially if you have a lot of them open at the same time and a small display. It rotates through all the top-level windows of the programs you have running, in order of most recent activity.
Copy, cut and paste: ctrl+c, ctrl+x, and ctrl+v / ⌘+c, ⌘+x, and ⌘+v
Bread and butter stuff right here. I’ve already used this combination several times in the course of writing this article (and I’m only on the second shortcut). This is pretty straight-forward and fairly commonly-used, but for those unfortunate souls who’ve been suffering at the hands of the right-click… Here you go.
Find and replace: ctrl+f and ctrl+h / ⌘+f and ⌘+h
Ctrl+f is absolutely fabulous when you’re trying to look for a certain phrase or section of a really, really long document, online or offline. If you’ve discovered that you’ve made the same silly mistake throughout an entire document, ctrl+h is your shortcut.
Undo and redo: ctrl+z and ctrl+y / ⌘+z and ⌘+y
I found these two indispensable photoshopping and doing digital art. You’ll find a multitude of ways to make use of these if you make any mistakes at all.
Select all: ctrl+a / ⌘+a
It physically pains me to see people manually trying to select huge sections of text, especially when this one makes it so easy.
Bold, italics, and underline: ctrl+b, ctrl+i, and ctrl+u / ⌘+b, ⌘+i, and ⌘+u
Another great set of useful, very spammable shortcuts that I don’t see a lot of people making use of.
These sets are just a few of the basic keyboard shortcuts you’ll find yourself using in everyday tasks, but there are literally hundreds more out there. Go ahead and mess around a bit! You’ll be surprised by the awesome stuff you’ll find.