Although we may not pay much attention to them, keyboard shortcuts are extremely useful and are used by almost everyone in their daily workflow. Microsoft also recognizes that shortcuts contribute significantly to users' workflow and from time to time, adds new ones.
Now, a Microsoft engineer has unveiled another such shortcut, which, to everyone's surprise, has been around since the Windows 2000 era.
Writing on Microsoft’s “The Old New Thing” blog , Windows engineer Raymond Chen recently shared a brief historical look at scrollbar shortcuts. While going over the various options offered when interacting with the scrollbar, Chen mentioned a rather “hidden” shortcut: hold down the Shift key and click anywhere on the scrollbar.
What makes the discovery even more interesting is that Chen himself was aware of the shortcut, despite working on Windows for more than three decades. He says that to make large jumps while scrolling, he used the bar's context menu.
Judging by the comments on his post, Chen isn't the only one who was surprised. One user said he's been using Windows for 30 years but only just learned about both the Shift+click shortcut and the scrollbar options menu. Another said he's been using Windows for over two decades without knowing about the shortcut.
So what exactly does this shortcut do? Instead of grabbing the scroll bar cursor (the “handle”) and dragging it to where you want it, you can simply hold down the Shift key and click where you want it to go. Windows will move the scroll bar cursor directly to that location.
There is, however, a downside. As Chen points out, the Windows ecosystem has changed significantly over the years, and many applications no longer use the traditional Win32 scrollbar control.
For example, Electron and other web-based applications generally use the Chromium scrollbar. While it lacks the old context menu, it does support the Shift+click shortcut. The WPF XAML framework appears to support both the context menu and the Shift+click shortcut, while the WinUI XAML framework does not support either. A similar situation exists in Qt, where developers can choose which scrollbar behaviors to enable.
So, even though the shortcut has been around for a long time, there's no guarantee that it will work everywhere.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
