Recently I took part in an online Battle of the Brands http://thebattleofbrands.com/en
Both of the contestants are familiar to me since my childhood.
To cut the long story short, let me introduce this 2 awesome key combinations:
- [ALT]+[SHIFT]
- [CTRL]+[SHIFT]
As you probably guessed both of them are used to switch keyboard layout in PCs.
The heading of the topic yells my choice: [ALT]+[SHIFT]
I’ve been using CTRL+SHIFT barely for 7 years. Since I was introduced to the PC. I can recall in my memory, that second or third lesson during computer courses back in 2001 was how to set up your Windows 98 to use it smoothly. The first issue to fix in the standard Win98 installation was to change ALT+SHIFT into CTRL+SHIFT. I still can’t get it why it was done? CTRL+SHIFT was used everywhere. I can hardly find any reason for this choice nowadays.Possibly, that’s because people use mouse a lot. This sound a bit unclear, but I’ll make a point.
What do people use to select seldom words in Word/Notepad? Yeap, a mouse! But there’s a better choice: CTRL+SHIFT+(left/right arrows). You don’t have to move your mouse around and precisely click it twice over the word. Moreover, what should you do to select 2 words in a row? double click is a waste of time here. It selects only one word per time.
How do people navigate through all the tabbed interfaces – browsers, preference windows? Again, with a mouse! Mouse is not a choice if you need to get the office job done quickly. Keyboard is much quicker. The main key combination to navigate through tabs is CTRL+TAB (forth ->) and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB (back <-). The second one intersects with our keyboard layout combination. So it was unfairly forgotten. This OS feature often is not used at all! Since I discovered it I forgot about mouse while browsing through tabs. It greatly sped up my navigating.
The crux of the matter is that barely nobody wants to use their keyboard efficiently. They dream of it, but do nothing to improve their keyboard skills. Keyboard has much to offer! So go and get over it!