Chapter 5 Chromebook Shortcuts
When we discussed the Chrome Browser we learned a couple of keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are combination of keys that make your Chromebook do certain functions. For example, if you hold the Crtl key and press the n key you get a new Chrome window. When we want to tell you to press this key combination we will use the symbols Ctrl+n to describe what you are doing.
In our Chrome Browser lesson we taught you the commands:
Ctrl+n- open a new Chrome windowCtrl+t- open a new Chrome tabCtrl+w- close an open Chrome Window or tabCtrl+d- this will bookmark a page
There are in fact a large number of keyboard shortcuts. Depending on what you do most often with your Chromebook some may be more or less useful to you.
Here we will highlight a few that we use frequently and will come in handy for you during your data science career. To understand these key combinations first it is useful to know what some of the symbols on your Chromebook keyboard represent.
The arrows in the top left hand corner take you back to the previous webpage you visited in a Chrome Tab and forward to the next page you visited. We will call them the forward and back keys.
The back and forward keys are the arrows in the upper left of the keyboard.
The curly key next to that refreshes the page you are currently visiting. Sometimes if you make an update to a webpage you are building and want to see the update you will need to refresh the page. We will call this the refresh key.
The refresh key is the curly key in the upper left of the keyboard.
The full screen key will take a tab you are working on and make that tab fill the whole screen. This will hide your shelf and hide the bookmarks and search bar at the top of your screen. When working on coding or when you feel you don’t have enough screen space this button can be helpful. You can shrink the browser window back to the normal size by pressing the full screen button again. We will call this the fullscreen key.
The full screen key is the key with the window with two arrows in the upper middle of the keyboard.
The button next to that is the show all windows button. This button will show you all the windows you have open, including Chrome Windows and any Android Apps you might have open. We will call this button the showwindows button.
The show windows key is the key with the window and two lines next to it in the upper middle of the keyboard.
The screen lock key in the upper right hand corner will lock your Chromebook when you aren’t using it and if you set up your settings to require a password, then you will need to re-enter your password to re-open your Chromebook. When working on data science projects where the data is sensitive it is a good idea to lock your Chromebook whenever you aren’t using it. We will call this the lock key.
The lock key is the key with the lock in the upper right of the keyboard.
You will recall that the Launcher key is the key with the magnifying glass on the left hand side of the keyboard. We will call this the launcher key.
The launcher key is the magnifying glass on the right of the keyboard.
5.0.1 Taking Screenshots on a Chromebook
Using these keys we can now consider some of the more useful keyboard shortcuts on your Chromebook. This will definitely be a partial list, you can learn about the rest of the shortcuts from the Chromebook help documentation.
One of the most useful things to know how to do is to be able to take a screenshot. You will use this when you are trouble shooting problems in the course frequently. There are two ways to take a screenshot. The first is to use the command ctrl+showwindows. If you use this key combination you will take a picture of everything that appears on the screen. This first will appear as a pop-up box in the lower right hand corner.
The screenshot appears as a dialog in the lower right.
You can also open the Files App and see that the screenshot has been stored on your computer. All screenshots you take will automatically stored in Files on your computer.
The screenshot appears is stored in the Files App.
If you click twice quickly on the screenshot file it will open and you can see it looks exactly like what was on your screen when you took the screenshot.
The screenshot is a picture of whatever was on your screen.
Sometimes, rather than taking a picture of the whole screen you will want to take a picture of just a small part of the screen. There is a second screenshot command that lets you do this. If you press crtl+shift+showwindows then your screen will turn a shade darker and you will see your cursor is replaced with a bullseye icon. If you click and then drag, you can select only part of your screen to take a screenshot of. For example you could take a screenshot of just the upper right hand corner of the Files App.
A targeted screenshot is also stored as a png in the Files App.
This screenshot also will pop up in the lower right hand corner of your screen and then appear in your Files App.
A targeted screenshot only takes a picture of part of the screen.
5.0.2 Zooming in and out
Another set of useful shortcuts is to zoom your screen in and zoom your screen out. To zoom in, you can hold down ctrl and press the key that has the plus and equals on it (near the top right hand side of the keyboard). To zoom out, you can hold the ctrl key and press the key with the minus and underscore key on it (near the top right hand side of the keyboard). This will allow you to make the text on websites bigger and smaller to ease reading. For example on the website https://rstudio.cloud/ if you press ctrl+plus/equals four times you will zoom in 175%.
If you use the zoom shortcut the text on a webpage increases in size.
5.0.3 Finding a word on a page
Sometimes you will need to search a webpage for a specific word or phrase. To do this you can press ctrl+f and a box will pop up. You can then search for the specific word, for example we could search for the word “teach” on https://rstudio.cloud/.
You can find a word or phrase on a page using the find shortcut.
5.0.4 Text formatting shortcuts
Many of the text formatting shortcuts are nearly the same as on other types of computers. We will review them briefly here as they will be very useful when editing documents, presentations, and code. If you have used computers before you may already know these.
ctrl+c- copies selected textctrl+v- pastes the selected textctrl+x- cuts the selected text and copies it so you can paste it elsewherectrl+z- undoes the previous action you did when editing a file
One thing that is somewhat unusual about a Chromebook is that there is not a caps lock key. If you want to turn on caps lock you will need to use the command alt+launcher. To turn caps lock back off again you can simply click on the shift key.