{"id":103016,"date":"2019-10-22T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=103016"},"modified":"2019-10-21T19:52:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T02:52:19","slug":"20191022-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20191022-00\/?p=103016","title":{"rendered":"What’s the difference between the hotkeys F6<\/KBD> and Alt<\/KBD>+F6<\/KBD>?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago, I listed some of the historical system hotkeys<\/a>, and I noted that of the ones on the list, only Alt<\/kbd>+F4<\/kbd> and Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> are still around.<\/p>\n

You’re probably familiar with Alt<\/kbd>+F4<\/kbd>. It’s the hotkey for closing the current window. The Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> hotkey is not as well known. It’s the hotkey for switching among windows within an application.<\/p>\n

But what kind of “switching among windows within an application” are we talking about? Many programs use F6<\/kbd> or even Ctrl<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> for switching windows.<\/p>\n

More specifically, the Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> hotkey is for switching among top-level<\/i> windows in an application. For example, start Notepad, type some text, and then press Ctrl<\/kbd>+F<\/kbd> to call up the search dialog. At this point, you can use Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> to switch between the search dialog and the main Notepad window.<\/p>\n

At least, that’s what it used to do. You can try it yourself on Windows 95<\/a>. But it doesn’t seem to work in Windows 10. Not sure if that’s a bug or a feature.<\/p>\n

Anyway, that’s what Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> was for.<\/p>\n

One related hotkey F6<\/kbd> is not a system hotkey, but it is a common application convention for switching among sections of a window, or more generally, between sections of an application. For example, in most Web browsers, the F6<\/kbd> hotkey moves between the address bar and the Web page.<\/p>\n

Another related hotkey Ctrl<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> is also not a system hotkey. It is a common application convention for switching among documents within a single window. In the old days, these were Multiple Document Interface<\/a> windows, but nowadays they are more likely to be tabbed windows.<\/p>\n

That’s the rundown of F6<\/kbd>-related hotkeys. Only Alt<\/kbd>+F6<\/kbd> is a system hotkey. The others are application-defined hotkeys, but most applications use them for navigating within the main application window.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Switching between things, but different things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-103016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Switching between things, but different things.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}