28th June 2001

Have you seen the movie You've Got Mail? There's one scene in that movie where Tom Hanks types out a long diatribe in an email, then decides to delete it. Instead of using the mouse like normal people to highlight the text and delete it with a single keystroke, he taps the backspace key approximately a thousand times, which really grates on my nerves whenever I see it... how annoying for a geek to be forced to watch such a thing. Keyboard shortcuts are an absolute necessity. Instead of wearing out your backspace key, hold down the CTRL key, and then hit it a few times. You'll take out one whole word at a time versus a single character. Text selection is another area that doesn't necessarily require the mouse to accomplish quickly. You probably know that holding down the shift key and using the arrows allows you to select text, but the CTRL key once again changes this from a single character to an entire word at a time. Most word processors, text editors and many other applications support these mechanisms. Go forth and CTRL your text!