Hotkeys Review: Add more shortcuts to your keyboard!

Hotkeys Review: Add more shortcuts to your keyboard!

The Windows key is one of the most powerful keys on our keyboards. And yet many of us use it for just a couple of quick shortcuts or neglect it altogether. 

Tapping the Windows key brings up your start menu.
Win+E starts Explorer, Win+D immediately minimizes all open windows and gives you immediate access to your desktop. Pressing Win+D again brings back all those minimized windows to their original states. Win+Pause is a great way to view your System Properties, Win+R brings up the run dialog box. But even when you use the Windows key in one or all of these ways you’re grossly underutilizing its full potential.

Hotkeys by Qliner Software is a stylish looking freeware utility that’ll help you make the most of this powerful key and save you the hassle of navigating through (an often) crowded start menu.  Hotkeys hovers a graphical representation of your keyboard when you hold down the Windows key. Now you can assign your favorite shortcut to any one of the several available keys. For example, on my system, I’ve assigned the W key to Winamp. So anytime I feel like listening to some music I just press the Win+W combination. You can even assign folder shortcuts to keys. Sick of browsing to your My Documents folder? Just assign a Hotkeys shortcut and you can pop it up in a second anytime you need it. Hotkeys also has several inbuilt tasks that let you do anything from adjusting your date& time to muting your system volume to tiling all your open windows. All of this just by using a Windows key shortcut.

Easy to setup & use
Hotkeys is extremely easy to set up and use. It has a New Hotkey Wizard that lets you browse to files or folders that you want to assign shortcuts to. You can even assign shortcuts to programs, folders or specific files by dragging and dropping them on any available key on the on-screen keyboard. The onscreen keyboard (which you can pop up by holding down the windows key or toggle using a shortcut) lets you see the associated shortcuts. In the picture above you can see that the W key has been assigned to Microsoft Word. 

Don’t have a standard keyboard?
Hotkeys supports over a hundred international keyboard layouts (including Dvorak and laptop keyboards)  incase you don’t have a standard keyboard.

Don’t have a Windows Key?!
You can still use Hotkeys. Hotkeys will let you set your caps lock key as the Windows key.

Hotkeys Homepage  ||  Download Hotkeys [2.1 MB requires MS .Net Framework 2.0 ]

Digistrom is a blog dedicated to smart Windows apps for the discerning user.