
Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it? - mmastrac
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/02/13/10267063.aspx
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mikeknoop
There are some cool hidden shortcuts (for killing explorer.exe mentioned in
the comments:

1\. Open the start menu, hold ctrl+shift, click the "power" button. A context-
menu appears which lets you kill Explorer (explorer.exe).

2\. Click on taskbar, press alt+f4, "Shut Down Windows" dialog appears. Holt
ctrl+alt+shift and click "cancel" to kill explorer.exe

Anyone else know of interesting hidden shortcuts (not necessarily to kill
explorer.exe)?

~~~
davux
Actually, you can Ctrl+Shift+Click anywhere on the Start menu in Windows 7 to
get this menu, not just the power button. In Windows 8, it was also added to
the ctrl+shift+click menu on the taskbar as well.

Ctrl+Shift+Click (and sometimes just Shift+Click) works all over Windows
Explorer to provide extra context menu options. For example if you Shift+Click
on a jumplist program item, you'll get more options on that menu as well (Run
as admin (Ctrl+Shift+Click on the taskbar icon to invoke this as well)).

There's even more new in Win8 (I don't have Win7 handy to test on, not sure if
these were in there too): Shift+Right-cclick will give you 'Open in new
process' and 'Open command window here.'

Edit: Thanks SquareWheel - you're right only Shift is needed for 'Open Command
window here' and some other options.

~~~
SquareWheel
As far as I understand, you only need to hold shift for extra context menu
items. I use this with "Open command window here" frequently.

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willvarfar
A dull story but an excellent way for a new generation of hackers to discover
Raymond Chen's oldnewthing blog!

Raymond was knighted by Joel Spolsky as the compatibility camp hacker at
Microsoft just when others at Microsoft were pushing for a reinvention of
Windows.

Raymond has lots of really fascinating insights into how Windows works, which
are interesting to even non-Windows coders like myself.

Everyone, go read his blog! :)

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laumars
IIRC [alt]+[space] did the same when the start button was highlighted (I'm
sure I managed that back when I ran Win95).

You could have all sorts of fun with the start button / task bar though. I
remember writing a breakout game where the start button was the paddle. The
code itself was very simple as it was basic Win32 APIs. As messy as those APIs
were, they're lack of basic security made it great fun to write all sorts of
weird hacks hehehe.

In fact, going back to the topic of MDIs (as the article referenced in
relation to the WS_SYSMENU style), I wrote a basic program that would work as
a winword 95 / 97 plug in (winword being an MDI back then) that would dump
iexplore into winword so it would behave exactly like any other word document.
This was done purely to get away with surfing the net in college as it was
easier to hide your browser session behind a word document that it was to
close/reopen it every time a lecturer walked past. IIRC that was just one API
call (something like SetHwndParent?), but that was /years/ ago now and I've
since left Windows development for Linux and Unix.

</nostalgia>

~~~
camtarn
Indeed - if I recall, Raymond Chen explained in one post that the Win32 API
implementation had so many restrictions on its code size and speed that the
Windows programmers had to omit a lot of sanity checks and special cases, and
just trust that developers wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot (or at least
notice the missing foot in QA and remove the foot-shooting code.)

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nopassrecover
I just learned recently that Ctrl-Shift-Esc brings up Taskmgr.

Up until then I'd been relying on Ctrl-Alt-Del, which in W7 tends to bring up
its own screen and is slower due to shell context changes.

~~~
davux
Actually, CAD taskmgr is slower because it has to switch from the secure
desktop session to the current session.

As it happens, Raymond recently did a blog post on this as well!
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/30/10261...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/30/10261611.aspx)

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thought_alarm
Was anyone actually aware of this Alt+hyphen shortcut?

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est
It's the first time I heard of it.

standard Windows controls has so many cool shortcuts. Like the RichEdit
control, you can use Alt+X to switch between hex and character.

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raldi
Anyone got a screenshot?

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teeny
Thought the same, made some. ;) <http://imgur.com/a/jftFy>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Danke!

