Wednesday, May 11th, 2005, 4:30 am
Universal Accelerators
There appears to be a consistency across platforms when it comes to keyboard accelerators. Here are a few examples:
CTRL+Enter
dispatches E-mailALT+F4
closes the window in focusALT+TAB
cycles between windowsCTRL+P
prints a pageF11
enables full-screen mode
Under a Mac, ALT
and CTRL
will vary. All accelerators exist to save you time, so learn them, practice them and most importantly, use them.
While on the issue of accelerators, menu layouts have become consistent as well. This suggests that more operating systems and more application are designed to ‘absorb’ new users. The biggest gainers are standards and conventions of course.