Tech News Long time Windows users amazed as senior Microsoft engineer discovers "hidden" shortcut

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https://www.neowin.net/news/long-time-windows-users-amazed-as-senior-microsoft-engineer-discovers-hidden-shortcut/

Writing on Microsoft's The Old New Thing blog, veteran Windows engineer Raymond Chen recently shared a brief history of scrollbar shortcuts. While discussing the various options available when interacting with the scrollbar, Chen pointed out a rather "hidden" shortcut, which requires you to hold Shift while clicking anywhere on the scrollbar.

What makes the discovery even more amusing is that Chen himself admits that he did not know about it until recently, despite having worked on Windows for more than three decades. He says that he had instead been relying on the scrollbar's context menu whenever he needed to make a large jump.

Judging by the comments on his post, Chen is certainly not alone in feeling surprised. One commenter said that they had used Windows for 30 years and had only just learned about both the Shift+click shortcut and the scrollbar context menu. Another commenter said they had used Windows for more than two decades without knowing about the shortcut.

So, what exactly does it do? Well, instead of grabbing the scrollbar's thumb and dragging it to your desired location, you can simply hold the Shift key and click on the spot where you want to go. Windows will then move the scrollbar thumb directly to that position. Let's call it the Shift+click shortcut.

Interestingly, this is actually different from the more obvious right-click scrollbar menu. Microsoft added that menu around the Windows 2000 time, depending on the specific functionality, and it included options such as Scroll Here, Top, Bottom, Page Up, Page Down, Scroll Up, and Scroll Down.

The "Scroll Here" option itself lets you right-click on a particular point on the scrollbar and then select the option to jump there. However, as Chen explains, the Shift+click method is even more convenient since you can simply focus on where you want to go rather than having to drag the thumb there.

There is, however, a rather unfortunate catch. As Chen points out, the Windows ecosystem has changed considerably over the years, and many apps no longer use the traditional Win32 scrollbar control.