B (6:53)

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A (11:19)

Paul. All right, welcome back. Looking at multitasking, there are many, many keyboard shortcuts. I am not going to be able to go through all of them. I don't use all of them a lot necessarily, but I do use a bunch of them. So let me just get again some windows going here. So you can kind of see that stuff. So there's something to look at here. So Control Alt Delete might be the most famous keyboard shortcut in all of Windows. I don't know if you can see this in the recording, but it brings up a screen that lets you lock the screen. It lets you get into Task Manager and do different things. And so it's kind of the. Everything's gone haywire. Break the glass, get out of here. This is kind of the way out I mentioned earlier, Alt Tab. So when I. I'm going to hold this down. So you hold down the Alt key and hit Tab and you get a list of all of the apps that are running. And so some of these things aren't on this screen. I've got multiple screens going, recording, etc. But you can see everything that's available. And if you just select one, it goes to that app. Right, Right. Most people. Well, I just said most people don't know this, but most people watching this probably know this. If you don't know this one though, you can also do Alt Shift Tab, which feels a little weird at first, but it goes in the opposite direction. And so the reason that's important is sometimes I'll be working. I have, you know, 25, 30 apps running and the app I want to get to is the last one or near the end of the list. If you go backwards, you can get to it really quickly. Right. And I find myself doing that a lot with affinity for some reason. Photo app like, it's. It's usually it gets pushed down at the end. So I just Alt Shift Tab and I tip, tip and get right over to it. So that's pretty good. That's a lesser known. I mentioned Win Key plus Tab is Task View. So Task View works like Alt Tab, except it's persistent. I'm not holding down any keys. You hit it, it stays up. I can use the arrow keys to navigate around if that's what I want. I can also access the desktops feature, which is that virtual desktop thing. I have multiple screens going here. So what you can't see is that where Alt Tab shows all of the apps in that one interface, this one only shows the apps that are on that screen. So the screen over here to the left has three other windows that are not the same that you're looking at. And the one that's over on the right has a different app, just one app in that case. But it actually segregates the apps to whatever screen they're on, which is also Very cool, right? Because you can go back and forth, you know, just go over and select the one you want. You know where it's going to open, too, which is kind of nice. So it's a little more sophisticated. We talk a lot about Snap. And one of the previous episodes I mentioned, I normally turn this thing off. So this is that layout deal. And I do. It was off when I recorded whatever that episode was a couple of times ago. But I normally do turn that off. But it's kind of a handy way to get up and get the layouts. But you can do this stuff with your keyboard as well. So I'm going to stick to the one screen, but you can do this across screens as well. So Windows key plus I'm getting that little sparkle. But Windows key plus up arrow will maximize or go up like that. Windows key plus down will go down from maximize to restore. And if I do it again, we'll go to minimize. Right? You can also use it just to snap to a side of the screen, right? So I can snap to the left side and then I'll just get out of that and snap to the right side. Right. So to me, this is very natural. I've been doing this for so many years and it just. This is how I do things. It's nice. There's also a really good keyboard shortcut for Task Manager. So most people probably know that you can right click on the Taskbar, get the Task Manager. You can right click on the Start menu, which, by the way, I should have mentioned that one before. So Windows Key plus X brings up this quick Settings menu. So you can get to Task Manager in this list as well. You can do the Control Alt Delete thing I said before, but you can also do. It's Control Shift Escape just to launch it directly. So if you have to get into Task Manager for some reason, typically you're going to come in here because something is not doing well and you have to kill it. But that's one way to do that. Okay, now, Clipboard type keyboard shortcuts, right? I think most people. I'll just type some nonsense, right? I can select this thing. Control A, select. All right. Control C, copy it to the clipboard. Control X, cut it so it's in the clipboard. And then Control V to paste it back into the app. In this case, it's just some, you know, nonsense text. It's fine. So those are basic, and I think most people probably do understand those. Windows also supports an optional feature called Clipboard History. So in this case It's Windows Windows Key plus Control plus V. So instead of Control V, it's Windows Key Control Voice. No, it isn't the right thing. There it is. No, it's Windows Windows Key Control V. Oh, hits. I'm doing the right thing. Anyway, it should. What it should bring up is Clipboard history. So I don't have that enabled on here, but if normally you would get the chance to do that. I should also mention that in PowerToys there's an advanced paste which is pretty useful. I'm still kind of sorting through this myself because I like to paste as text and this is one of those things you can use this for. But where is it? What did I say it's called Advanced paste. So it's right there. So if you enable this and you get. You can change this. But it's Windows Key Shift V which very similar to what I was just doing. You get these options and so paste is plain text is the top options could be useful for me. Also paste is markdown. I use markdown a lot. So this might be useful to you if you're doing a lot of stuff with the Clipboard. Also pretty useful. The print key. The print screen key has changed a lot in Windows over the years. It used to always just copy the screen a screenshot to the Clipboard. They added a. Microsoft added a Windows key plus print screen which would copy that screenshot to a file in your screenshots folder. So if I do that from here. This is kind of a non standard keyboard, so I have to think about this. Maybe I should just do it over there. Yeah, this keyboard's a little strange. Let me see what that does. Nope, wrong one. All right. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to have to use this. Let me see if that does it. Yeah, that should do it. Flashed. So if I go into the pictures folder and then screenshots, it will eventually come here and I have multiple screens. So you're seeing three screens there, but it will still save it to the file. So it's useful. The other thing is that Microsoft has in Windows 11 set the default for print screen from copy to the Clipboard to the snipping tool. So this is one thing I disabled because I don't typically use the snipping tool. Not because it's not great, because I just have very specific needs so I disable that. But typically if that thing was on and I think we'll try this. Nope, wrong one. I was at the wrong one. This is a strange keyboard. Well, I'm not. I'M not. I have a weird keyboard, but without an actual print screen key. But that would bring up snipping tool in that case. So I just am not going to do that. But you could do that if you wanted to get this out of here. Okay. And then there's, you know, things like control Z for undo, control Y, redo. I think most people pretty much, you know, kind of get that stuff. There are windows, window, I should say window related shortcuts, the weird one, because it's starting to change because different apps are taking this over. Let me see if I can bring up an app where this might make sense. If you hit alt space for a long, long time, since the early stage of Windows, it would bring up this, what they call a window menu. And depending on the state of the window, you're going to see different options. So for example, I can maximize now, but if I do that again, you'll see now I don't have those same options. Right. Because now it's maximized. But the very useful thing here to me is move. Sometimes you might have a window that's a little off the screen and you can't see the top to click it and drag it. And when that happens, you can just hit it's alt space and then M as you can see for move. And then you can just use the arrow keys to move it around, get it back on screen. It's super useful to me. The problem is certain apps, including Copilot, are trying to override that key. Press the PowerToys. The app, I forget the name of it, what used to be powertoys run also wants to take over that. So I changed the keyboard shortcut for that app to be Windows key plus space. Not all plus space, but you can kind of play around with that. All plus four still works in many, many apps. I will try that here. Let's see if it works here. No, it does not, because I'm not doing this. Yeah, so it did work actually, because it wants to save. I don't. I feel like people kind of don't use that one as much anymore. If I have multiple documents open here, Control W. Right, close a document. But not the app that's going to work in Word. It's going to work in, you know, web browsers, et cetera. So Copilot, like we talked in a previous episode, no keyboard shortcuts, alt space. If you enable it, it's going to steal that. I don't like that personally. It can be used to launch search. I just try to get Rid of that thing. I just don't like it. I mentioned Windows Key comma right, is sort of a temporary show desktop. Windows Key+ period brings up this thing called. People call this like the emoji panel, but it's really emojis and more. And you might look at this and think, look, I'm an adult. I'm not going to be using emojis. I don't necessarily want this happy face thing in my document or whatever. And I hear you. However, there's other stuff in here and this is actually very useful. So if you go over to symbols, this is the type of thing. I never understood why there weren't keyboard shortcuts for this stuff in Windows. And you can use this instead. So if you need something like the euro or the pound, you know, we're in the United States, so it's not on our keyboard or the yen sign here a lot. These symbols are all just available in here. And this is a much easier way to find this stuff than Googling it, finding whatever the control code is. Or maybe you want the euro and you can copy it from a web document and then paste it like this. You can just get right to it. And so, you know, for the euro or whatever, you can just get right to it. So this is actually very useful to know. So even if you are disdainful of emojis, which I understand, be sure to look at this. I keep mentioning PowerToys, but there's also a PowerToys tool called Quick Accent, which is a way to have a toolbar running so that when you. You can, like you do on mobile, hold down a key on the N and one of the options will be like a tilde over the end, that kind of thing. Pretty useful. Windows key +G will bring up the game bar, which usually you would want to do in a game. This is not a game, but you can see the game bar. So that's useful. If you're playing a game on your computer and using the keyboard, you don't want to take your hands, you know, off the keyboard, obviously, you can just see that really quick. It's nice. And then let me. I don't have edge on here because, yeah, that's what I do. But let me. Let me run this. And then I'm going to need a new window here. So this is just. I'm running a web browser, hopefully, and just some standard keys that everyone knows, right? And so everyone kind of knows, like Windows key +t is going to be new tab. Windows key +w is going to close the tab. But if I were to go to say like the Microsoft website, right? And I go there and then I go to the Apple website and I'm doing whatever I'm doing. So like a lot of people I've got a lot of stuff going on. I've got all these tabs going and open a third one and maybe this one's Google or whatever and Maybe I have 27 tabs but it doesn't really matter. But I close this tab, right? So it's the Microsoft website. Not super important really. But let's say it was something important. I closed the wrong tab. So I'm like control W. Like oh, that's not what I meant. So you can do Control Shift T right away actually you can just keep going. I could Control Shift T all the way back to you know, I think when the browser first started running and get it back. It's most useful for the thing you just closed by mistake. But I've done it, you know, 15, 20, 30, whatever minutes into whatever I was doing like oh, I need that thing back and I could just do it repeatedly. It's going to open a bunch of tabs but I'll eventually get back to that thing. I mean obviously you can go to History or whatever but this is, I feel like very few people know about this. Super, super useful control shift +t to get back a tab that you close by mistake. You know, it's, it's good to know about. So I've only scraped the surface of what's possible with keyboard shortcuts. There are so, so many. But I wanted to go over this because there are, I feel like people don't know a lot about these things. I feel like there are Windows key based shortcuts especially that people don't know about. There's this copilot thing we have to deal with and just the this emoji thing which again I think people, some people like. What is this? I don't know. I don't really. I don't want to add like an animated GIF to my Word, my text document here which actually can't anyway in Notepad but it's useful for the more part which is a few things but this symbols interface which has you know, different subheadings for simple, you know, currencies and punctuations. Very, very, very useful. So that one's good to know about too. So hopefully you found this to be useful. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at Twitter TV hrw. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our club to IT members. We love you. If you're not a member, please do check that out at TWiT TV Club TWiT. Thank you. I'll see you next week.

B (25:08)

Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte. It's the last week to take our annual survey. This is so important for us to get to know you better. We thank everybody who's already taken the survey and if you're one of the few who has not, you have a few days left. Visit our website TWIT TV survey 26. Fill it out before January 31st day. Thank you so much.

A (25:30)

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