Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/02/13/10267063.aspx

by mmastrac • 14 years ago

94 19 14 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

mikeknoop• 14 years ago

There are some cool hidden shortcuts (for killing explorer.exe mentioned in the comments:

1. Open the start menu, hold ctrl+shift, click the "power" button. A context-menu appears which lets you kill Explorer (explorer.exe).

2. Click on taskbar, press alt+f4, "Shut Down Windows" dialog appears. Holt ctrl+alt+shift and click "cancel" to kill explorer.exe

Anyone else know of interesting hidden shortcuts (not necessarily to kill explorer.exe)?

davux2• 14 years ago

Actually, you can Ctrl+Shift+Click anywhere on the Start menu in Windows 7 to get this menu, not just the power button. In Windows 8, it was also added to the ctrl+shift+click menu on the taskbar as well.

Ctrl+Shift+Click (and sometimes just Shift+Click) works all over Windows Explorer to provide extra context menu options. For example if you Shift+Click on a jumplist program item, you'll get more options on that menu as well (Run as admin (Ctrl+Shift+Click on the taskbar icon to invoke this as well)).

There's even more new in Win8 (I don't have Win7 handy to test on, not sure if these were in there too): Shift+Right-cclick will give you 'Open in new process' and 'Open command window here.'

Edit: Thanks SquareWheel - you're right only Shift is needed for 'Open Command window here' and some other options.

SquareWheel• 14 years ago

As far as I understand, you only need to hold shift for extra context menu items. I use this with "Open command window here" frequently.

thought_alarm• 14 years ago

Was anyone actually aware of this Alt+hyphen shortcut?

endgame• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure I remember it from Windows 3.1.

est• 14 years ago

It's the first time I heard of it.

standard Windows controls has so many cool shortcuts. Like the RichEdit control, you can use Alt+X to switch between hex and character.

mortenlarsen• 14 years ago

I used it back in school to move the start button off the screen. Just a stupid prank.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Alt-hifen was the way to access the window menu of child MDI windows. I did a lot of those in the Windows 3.11 days.

I learned about its "evil use" in 95 or so. The problem was present in the UI preview add-on for NT 3.51.

schandur• 14 years ago

I knew about it, but always figured it was an easter egg!

mickeyp• 14 years ago

Surprisingly, yes. I remember it was part of the Windows 95 folklore back in the day. It only worked on the earlier versions, as I recall, as the newer builds fixed it.

raldi• 14 years ago

Anyone got a screenshot?

teeny• 14 years ago

Thought the same, made some. ;) http://imgur.com/a/jftFy

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Danke!

nopassrecover• 14 years ago

I just learned recently that Ctrl-Shift-Esc brings up Taskmgr.

Up until then I'd been relying on Ctrl-Alt-Del, which in W7 tends to bring up its own screen and is slower due to shell context changes.

davux2• 14 years ago

Actually, CAD taskmgr is slower because it has to switch from the secure desktop session to the current session.

As it happens, Raymond recently did a blog post on this as well! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/01/30/10261...

richbradshaw• 14 years ago

Ctrl+Shift+Escape is the karate chop of death.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

A dull story but an excellent way for a new generation of hackers to discover Raymond Chen's oldnewthing blog!

Raymond was knighted by Joel Spolsky as the compatibility camp hacker at Microsoft just when others at Microsoft were pushing for a reinvention of Windows.

Raymond has lots of really fascinating insights into how Windows works, which are interesting to even non-Windows coders like myself.

Everyone, go read his blog! :)

laumars• 14 years ago

IIRC [alt]+[space] did the same when the start button was highlighted (I'm sure I managed that back when I ran Win95).

You could have all sorts of fun with the start button / task bar though. I remember writing a breakout game where the start button was the paddle. The code itself was very simple as it was basic Win32 APIs. As messy as those APIs were, they're lack of basic security made it great fun to write all sorts of weird hacks hehehe.

In fact, going back to the topic of MDIs (as the article referenced in relation to the WS_SYSMENU style), I wrote a basic program that would work as a winword 95 / 97 plug in (winword being an MDI back then) that would dump iexplore into winword so it would behave exactly like any other word document. This was done purely to get away with surfing the net in college as it was easier to hide your browser session behind a word document that it was to close/reopen it every time a lecturer walked past. IIRC that was just one API call (something like SetHwndParent?), but that was /years/ ago now and I've since left Windows development for Linux and Unix.

</nostalgia>

camtarn• 14 years ago

Indeed - if I recall, Raymond Chen explained in one post that the Win32 API implementation had so many restrictions on its code size and speed that the Windows programmers had to omit a lot of sanity checks and special cases, and just trust that developers wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot (or at least notice the missing foot in QA and remove the foot-shooting code.)

Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?

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