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.
Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#12I 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.
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...
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#13Was anyone actually aware of this Alt+hyphen shortcut?
I used it back in school to move the start button off the screen. Just a stupid prank.
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#14Anyone got a screenshot?
Thought the same, made some. ;) http://imgur.com/a/jftFy
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#15A 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! :)
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#16IIRC [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.
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#17IIRC [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 sor…
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.)
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#18Was anyone actually aware of this Alt+hyphen shortcut?
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.
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#19Was anyone actually aware of this Alt+hyphen shortcut?
I knew about it, but always figured it was an easter egg!
Re: Why did the Windows 95 Start button have a secret shortcut for closing it?
#20I 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.
Ctrl+Shift+Escape is the karate chop of death.