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Marshall

Hi, I’m Marshall Brain with today’s question.

What is the Alt F4 key do?

Alt F4 is a special keystroke that is wired into the Windows operating system. You hold the Alt key, and hit F4 simultaneously. It closes the current window. When you want to close a window, it takes a single keystroke. You might be familiar with some of these keystrokes. For example, Alt plus tab will let you cycle through all of the available windows, and jump to the one you select. It turns out that there are several other handy keystrokes like Alt F4 built into Windows. For example, control plus the escape key will pop up the start menu, and Alt plus escape will bring the next window to the foreground.

On keyboards that have that little Windows key down near the spacebar, you probably know that you can press that key to open the start menu. You can also use that key with other keys. For example, the Windows key plus the E key will start the Windows explorer. The Windows key plus the F key will start the find and files dialogue. The Windows key plus the M key minimizes all the windows, and clears out your desktop. The Windows key plus the shift key plus the M key restores all of those minimized windows. The Windows key plus the R key starts the run dialogue, and the Windows key plus the F1 key starts Windows help. You can learn about dozens of these special keystrokes by hitting the Windows key with F1 to pull up the help center, and then type in Windows keyboard shortcuts into the search field.

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