Six more keystrokes, then rest

By now your hands own three: Ctrl and C, Ctrl and V, and the undo that rescued the paragraph you did not mean to kill. Alt and Tab walks you through open windows. That is a respectable number. It is also where most people stop, and then spend ten years clicking through menus for the five acts they perform every day. This lesson adds six more keystrokes. Then it asks you to stop. Collecting shortcuts like proverbs is not skill. Using six until they are reflexes is.

The first is Ctrl and S — save. The light does not send a warning before it goes, and neither does a battery. Save every few minutes and a power cut costs you a paragraph, not an evening. It works in Word, in spreadsheets, in Docs, in almost everything that makes documents. In a browser it offers to save the page itself, which you will rarely need — so the rule is simple: Ctrl and S belongs to programs, not to pages.

Find, before you read everything

Ctrl and F opens a small box, usually in a corner. Type a word — bank, deadline, refund — and the page jumps to it, marking every place the word sits. It works in Word, in the browser, in the PDFs you met in their own lesson, on long group pages. It is the difference between scrolling a form with your eyes for ten minutes and asking the machine, which reads the whole page in a blink, to point. People underestimate this one. It is the most intelligent lazy thing a computer does for you.

Select all, and three for the browser

Ctrl and A selects everything in the document or on the page: one press, and the whole text sits highlighted, ready to copy, ready to delete. Ready to delete is why you pause before pressing A in a document you love. In the browser, three small ones. Ctrl and T opens a new tab — a fresh doorway, so you do not type a new address over the page you are reading. Ctrl and L jumps the cursor straight to the address bar, where the internet lesson taught you to type. Ctrl and W closes the tab you have finished with. It closes without asking, so save any form you were filling first.

• Open the letter you typed last week. Press Ctrl and S now, out of respect.
• Press Ctrl and F on any long page and look for the word price. Watch it count.
• Press Ctrl and A in Notepad, then Ctrl and C. You have copied a page in two seconds.
• Practise Ctrl and T, Ctrl and L, Ctrl and W as one walk: open, address, close. Repeat it on purpose for a week.

Then stop

There are hundreds more, and one day you will meet Ctrl and P for printing, and be pleased it was waiting. But six is a year's worth. The hands learn by repetition, not by lists, and a shortcut you use weekly is worth fifty you memorised in one proud evening. Close the list. Go and use the six.