There is no computer that is not used with the mouse (unless you have a touchscreen monitor) therefore, knowing how to use it well is important to move between Windows, browser windows and, in general, to use the computer quickly . In Windows, there are three buttons on the mouse, among which, the middle one, is a scroll wheel.
With these three buttons you can do many things in different ways, depending on where they are pressed.
In this post, we see some of the lesser known tricks for using the mouse on Windows .
1) Hold down the Shift key to select portions of text or groups of files in a folder .
Uncomfortable and widespread practice is to select multiple files in a folder or a piece of text on a word sheet by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the selection.
Much easier and more precise is instead to press once with the left key on the first file, hold down Shift on the keyboard and then press again with the mouse at the end of the selection, on the last file.
On a sheet of text, click on the first character, then press the shift key, choose the last character, click here and release the shift key.
2) Hold down the Ctrl key to select different pieces of text or individual files together .
If you select Shift from the first to the last, with the same procedure you can hold down the Ctrl key to select only the files clicked in a folder.
At the same time, with Ctrl you can select different non-contiguous parts of a text.
Hold down the Ctrl key while selecting and, while holding it down, select another piece of text and so on.
3) Holding down Shift and then pressing the right mouse button on the Windows desktop or above a file or folder, a larger context menu opens, which includes some hidden options.
On this topic an in-depth post has been written concerning the secret menu of Windows 7 with Shift-Right button
4) Zoom with the mouse wheel + Ctrl .
Not everyone knows that, in Windows, both on the desktop, both on a sheet of text, and on a browser browsing the internet, or looking at a folder or anything else, if you press the CTRL key on the keyboard and then move the wheel the mouse, you can zoom in or out.
It is therefore immediate to zoom in or out on the text, icons, images and whatever you want.
5) With a double click of the mouse in the center of the title bar of a window, it is maximized or minimized.
A lesser known trick is instead that with a double click in the left corner of any window or program, it is closed.
6) On internet browsers, you can hold down the Ctrl key to open a link in the background, in a new tab, thus leaving the one you are watching open.
The same thing can be done by clicking on the links with the wheel.
7) On any browser such as Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can close a tab simply by pressing on it with the mouse wheel button.
This method is much faster than clicking on the cross or key combination.
8) Activate Block Mouse Click
Enter the Windows Control Panel and, in the Mouse section, activate the " Block click " option.
It allows you to change the behavior of dragging icons or other objects, so that you don't always have to hold down the left button to drag and drop or select items.
This also works for selecting text in a document or on an internet page.
The option is really convenient, especially on laptops.
9) Other customizable options regarding mouse drag have been described in the article: "By dragging a file (Drag and Drop) you can move or copy">
10) Hold down the Alt key to select Text in column, or vertically, on Microsoft Word.
Other tricks with the mouse have been described in other articles, using plugins or small additional tools, including:
- Use the mouse wheel to resize windows and edit transparencies
- Right mouse button: add options to the context menu
- Set different pointer speed for mouse and touchpad
- Click automatically with the mouse on the screen: Autoclick.
- Hide the mouse cursor automatically
- Record and repeat actions movements and clicks of mouse and keyboard
In addition, we can also mention two articles on how to change the mouse arrow by creating custom cursors and pointers.
There could be many other tricks of this kind so use the comment space to report others.
