Ctrl plus Backspace keyboard shortcut
I just ran across a new (new to me, anyway) keyboard shortcut that I think is pretty useful. It’s Ctrl+Backspace and it deletes the previous word. I encountered this shortcut at Raymond Chen’s blog, who writes:
A few people in the early days of the Internet Explorer group used the Brief editor, which uses Ctrl+Backspace as the shortcut key to delete the previous word, and they liked it so much that one of them added it to the autocomplete handler. Therefore, any edit control that uses SHAutoComplete will gain this secret Ctrl+Backspace hotkey.
This is one of those scary “rogue features”. There’s no spec, there’s no testing, it’s just a developer who spent some time whacking a feature into the product because he liked it.
I tried the shortcut in a number of applications and it works in Microsoft Word, Wordpad, and Outlook Express. Interestingly, it does not work in Notepad although it does in some other text editors like Notepad++.
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