Keyboard

Keyboard shortcuts are very handy (pardon the pun). If you use your mouse more than your keyboard, then does that make you a mouseketeer?

If you want to be proficient at using a computer, you should really learn (it's easy with KTouch) to be a fast typist. Maybe someday soon you can talk at your computer and it will be smart enough to do all the things you can instruct it to do using the keyboard, but at the present time, good keyboarding is a valuable skill.

Generally, menu's themselves will instruct you about the shortcuts that are available (that is what the underlined character is for). Just press the "Alt" key and press the underlined letter in the menu to activate that menu option. You can even navigate the menu by pressing Alt and then using arrow keys. Look at the menus, there are many nice options that you might not even know about.

Want an instant photo gallery? In the Konqueror file manager, hitting Ctrl+i creates an HTML image gallery, with many options.

Simply selecting text (e.g. by dragging the cursor, or using the keyboard) copies it to the 'clipboard' (no need to press Ctrl+c)

Also, simply selecting some text, from any application, and then hitting Ctrl+v (paste) on the desktop, asks you for a filename and then automatically creates a text file with the contents of the clipboard, with that name.

By the way, Shift+Insert; or just a middle mouse click is equivalent to Ctrl+v in most cases to perform a paste. So, a copy and paste can be done by dragging the mouse, and clicking the middle button.

Console/terminal[edit | edit source]

Ctrl-Alt-Delete - shuts down computer
Alt-Fn (F1, F2, F3, Fn) - switch to n-th console
Alt-Left or Alt-Right - switch to next/previous virtual terminal
Scroll Lock - locks terminal input/output - allows to read console contents when output is going too fast. To unlock, press Scroll Lock once again. Alternatively, Scroll Lock can be enabled using Ctrl-S and disabled with Ctrl-Q. Try last shortcut if your console hangs for unknown reason - it happened to me many times that I've locked it accidentaly by pressing CTRL-S.
Shift-Page Up and Shift-Page Down - scrolls console buffer up/down. Works also when Scroll Lock is enabled. After changing the terminal (Alt-Fn) buffer contents is erased and it is impossible to scroll it.
Ctrl-L - screen refresh
Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Backslash - kills current task
Ctrl-D - stands for EOF (End-of-file). If you type it on en empty command line, it will quit bash. This is so much faster than typing exit
Ctrl-Z - pause process. Use commands: bg to run in background or fg to run in foreground. So, if you launch a process in the terminal, and want your cursor back, press Ctrl+z to pause, then type bg to put it in the "background" and go on your merry way re-using your terminal.

Bash & command-line[edit | edit source]

Ctrl-A - moves cursor to beginning of command line.
Ctrl-E - moves cursor to end of command line.
Ctrl-K - clears command line from cursor position to end of line.
Ctrl-U - clears command line from cursor position to beginning of line.
Ctrl-W - clears word to the left
Ctrl-Y - will paste in anything that was deleted by Ctrl-U or Ctrl-K or Ctrl-W
Tab - command-line autocompletion. Automatically completes current command line. If autocompletion script is enabled, then also options and applications parameters are autocompleted.
Ctrl-R - followed by characters will do a incremental search of the previous command history

Kernel shortcuts[edit | edit source]

Following shortcuts must be enabled in kernel, they also must be enabled using proc interface (echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq).

Alt-SysRQ-S - sync all mounted filesystem. Data in buffers is immediately written to disks.
Alt-SysRQ-U - remounts mounted filesystems read-only
Alt-SysRQ-B - performs immediate reboot. Don't do it without syncing and unmounting as it can cause massive filesystem corruption
Alt-SysRQ-S, then Alt-SysRQ-U, then Alt-SysRQ-B - attempts to sync all mounted filesystems, remounts them read-only and immediately reboots computer. Fastest way to reboot Linux.
Alt-SysRQ-H - prints out list of other SysRQ functions.

X-Windows shortcuts[edit | edit source]

Another trick is that you don't need to click on the top of a window (titlebar) to move it. Alt+left click and dragging it from any part of the window (internal or border), has the same effect.
Alt+right click (and drag) will resize the window, again from any position within the window (no need to catch the tiny bottom corner).
Alt+middle click sends the active window to the background.
Ctrl-Alt-Plus or Ctrl-Alt-Minus- changes screen resolution (higher/lower). Only if X-Windows server is configured for multiple resolutions.
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace - restart X-server. Running applications will be terminated. So much faster than typing /etc/init.d/kdm restart
Ctrl-Alt-Escape - xkill - click an application to kill it.
Ctrl-Shift-Num Lock will turn the keypad on the keyboard into the mouse, so you can control the mouse from keyboard. Keys / and * on the numpad select left mouse click and right mouse click respectively. Mouse click is done by 5 on the numpad.
Ctrl-Alt-Fn (F1, F2, F3,Fn) - switches to n-th text console.
Ctrl-Fn (F1, F2, F3,...) - switches to the nth Virtual Desktop
Meta + "=" zooms in
Meta + "-" zooms out

KDE shortcuts[edit | edit source]

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Page Down - direct shutdown
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Page Up - direct reboot
Alt-F2 - Starts the run command box. Type a application executable to launch it, folder name to open it, filename to use an appropriate program to launch it, url to go to it in konqueror and any of the numerous web shortcuts(gg, wp) defined by konqueror to activate them.

Resources[edit | edit source]

You can view the current shortcuts in each application's menu/settings and for the KDE desktop, they are found in the 'keyboard' section of the KControl (System->System Settings) Do you know any other shortcuts good shortcuts? You can easily register and add them to this page

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/linux-shortcut-keys-369859/