What feature did you find after years of using Windows?

I can't recall when I found it about it, and OSX already has it - one of Windows' neatest tricks is being able to do some regular file operations in the standard open/save dialogs. It saved me countless clicks over the years at $WORK.

Was Windows the first to allow this, or was there some antecedent? There are 'modern' Linux GUI toolkits which still do not allow this, like GTK's GtkFileChooser which apparently lives in the dark ages (no thumbnail support there either).

Explorer: If you type cmd and press enter in the path bar it opens a cmd prompt at the current directory. Other way to open it is to hold shift when opening the folder context menu to expose this option.

Holding Shift while opening context menus usually show more advanced options, like the possibility to run as another user when right-clicking something executable.

Firefox: If you try to drag the mouse to select part of a link it you drag the link (so you can place it on the bookmarks toolbar/etc), to prevent this behavior you can hold Alt and now it'll let you select the text without dragging the link (this one is not windows specific, it works on Linux too).

Loads of shortcuts: F2: rename

F3: find

Alt F4: close window, ctrl-w seems to do this a lot these days too

Alt minus: show child document window menu

Alt space: show window menu, useful if you remember the X for maximize/minimize, z for resize, m for move, r for restore immediately afterwards.

F4 go to address bar in Explorer

F5 refresh

Ctrl F6 switch windows in MDI interface

Ctrl escape: show start menu

Shift-F10: right click menu

Windows E: explorer

Alt-up in explorer: go to directory above; backspace/alt-left: go to previous history item

Windows W windows ink for annotation

Windows R for run

Windows U for narrator

Windows F used to do find but now shows the feedback tool, which I think is a loss

Any command after the word control will open control panel to the right place, eg control display

Windows D show desktop toggle

Windows M minimise all windows, windows shift M restore windows

Ctrl-shift-escape: show task manager

Ctrl tab/ctrl-shift-tab move to next/previous UI item so you can use the UI with a keyboard; this is why web apps that pretend to be native are so useless and annoying because this doesn't work

Also system items normally end with .msc to open the management console, eg. Compmgmt.msc. There's a load of these that help you get to the nitty gritty of the system.

Turn on "show accelerators" in accessibility and menu entries and buttons will have their accelerator underlined, eg the O in OK or F in File. You can then use alt-(letter) to go to it, eg alt-f to open the file menu, s for save.

Honestly I don't know how I would have got through using Windows for decades without these shortcuts. I always find the Mac relies on mouse usage a lot more and the ctrl-F2 and ctrl-F3 shortcut to get to the menu bar and dock on Mac doesn't compare.

A couple of good surprises coming from MacOs:

- The window snapping shortcuts win + left or win + right are great. - Alt-tab rolls through all open windows, not open programs (avoids the tab + ` in mac) - Win + e to open explorer that one comes in handy often

I found them: Access a Start Menu for power users. ... Sniff out disk space-hoarding apps. ... Quickly minimize all windows except the active one. ... Stop background apps from running. ... Become a Start Menu power user. ... Print to PDF. ... Know these new useful keyboard shortcuts. ... New trackpad gestures.

I also find that people forget about the tricks on macos:

You can drag the icon from any title of a window into a finder window or dialog to go to that directory.

You can right-click on the title bar of any window and see the path to that window's document.

But enjoy Windows!

Recently discovered the Snipping Tool (start menu) - crop a screenshot rectangle, annotate with pen / highlighter, and save as JPG/PNG. Handy.

That you can click and drag a file to the command line window and it'll populate the path and filename.

Winkey + . to open the emoji picker

Ctrl + Shift + T : Reopens a browser tab that you just accidentally closed.

F2 to rename things