30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover

Keyboard Shortcuts

Almost everything you can do in Opera, you can do with the keyboard. You’ve already seen some, such as F2 to open the “Go to URL” prompt, F12 to bring up the Quick Preferences, and ctrl + Enter to trigger the wand. You’ve probably noticed some others as you have used Opera. We’re going to review some of the most important ones near the end of the series (Day 28: Keyboard Shortcuts).

But what if you want to know now?

Or what if (*gasp!*) you’ve found one that you don’t like? What if you keep pressing a key and expecting that it will do something, and it does something else?

Well, then don’t just sit there complaining, fix it!

Open up the Shortcuts preferences and double click on the “Opera Standard” entry under “Keyboard setup” and then just type a word or a keystroke. For example, type F4 and you will see all the keyboard commands which contain F4 as part of it (i.e. F4 by itself will open the Hotlist, shift + F4 will open the panel selector, alt + F4 will close the window, and so on. If you’re a heavy-duty keyboard user, you owe it to yourself to take a look through there (also take a look at the help files).

Say, for example, that you often go to press alt + F3 (View Source) but instead accidentally press alt + F4 (which exits Opera). In most browsers you’d just be out of luck and have to try not to do it again. In Opera, you can just go in, press Duplicate (you should preserve the original Opera Standard in case you ever want to go back to it), and then open up the duplicate, double click the entry for “F4 alt” and either change it to something else (“F12 alt” would make it a lot less likely to accidentally press it). Or just delete the “F4 alt” entry and close Opera another way.

As always, experiment! You won’t know what you can do until you try.

See also: Custom Keyboards @ my.opera.com

Mouse Shortcuts

In the same way, you can edit the Mouse Gestures (which I realize we also haven’t talked about much yet, but stay tuned for Day 15: Mouse Gestures to see more about that).

For some reason I found that I kept overlooking the button marked “Middle click options” (maybe because for the longest time I didn’t have a way to middle click). Opening that brings up this panel

where you can customize the middle click action.

You can look for Custom Mouse Gestures @ my.opera.com.