Image: Michael Crider/Foundry
Watching a power user go to town with keyboard shortcuts is quite a sight. Anyone who’s been using an operating system long enough, and invested even a small amount of time in enhancing their productivity, knows what I’m talking about. But you have to admit, not every single possible function needs a dedicated spot on your keyboard. Take “Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift+L,” for example: It’s a five-key combination that you probably need two hands to input correctly. Spoiler alert — the payoff isn’t worth it.
This game of Twister for your fingers is a system-level keyboard shortcut that…opens up LinkedIn in your browser. That’s it. It’s a hard-coded, five-key shortcut to a website. Which might be a cool feature, if you got to choose what it was. But in fact, as PCGamer notes, it’s actually a bit of corporate cross-promotion. LinkedIn, a career-focused social network where people can share their work history and apply for new jobs, has been owned by Microsoft since 2016.
Hey, at least it doesn’t force you to open the website in Edge, as most of the internal links in Windows do these days.
Still, it’s an awfully strange thing to program into the operating system, as if there are users who A) want instant access to LinkedIn and B) wouldn’t just put a link on their taskbar. Personally, I’ve been waiting years for Microsoft to create a system-level shortcut to switch between headphones and speakers, something that I have to use a third-party app to accomplish.
For a list of little-known Windows keyboard shortcuts that are actually useful, be sure to check out this guide.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.