{"id":95727,"date":"2017-03-14T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=95727"},"modified":"2019-03-13T01:08:01","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T08:08:01","slug":"20170314-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20170314-00\/?p=95727","title":{"rendered":"Why is Alt+D the keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The keyboard shortcut for putting focus on the address bar in Explorer and Internet Explorer (and Edge and the version of Internet Explorer that came with Windows 8 that nobody talks about even though I really liked it) is <kbd>Alt<\/kbd>+<kbd>D<\/kbd>. <\/p>\n<p>Why the letter D? <\/p>\n<p>Okay, the proximate reason is that there used to be the word &#8220;Address&#8221; next to the address bar, so you knew what that thing was. And the keyboard shortcut for that was &#8220;A<u>d<\/u>dress&#8221;, or <kbd>Alt<\/kbd>+<kbd>D<\/kbd>. You can still see the accelerator highlighted on the right hand side of <a HREF=\"https:\/\/msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net\/media\/TNBlogsFS\/BlogFileStorage\/blogs_msdn\/virtual_pc_guy\/WindowsLiveWriter\/HowdoIgetInternetExplorertoworkasapublis_14F6D\/publishing%20IE_2.png\">this ancient screen shot<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Over time, the label &#8220;Address&#8221; disappeared, but the accelerator remained as an accommodation for years of muscle memory. <\/p>\n<p>Okay, but why was it &#8220;A<u>d<\/u>dress&#8221; instead of &#8220;<u>A<\/u>ddress&#8221;? <\/p>\n<p>Because the accelerator <kbd>Alt<\/kbd>+<kbd>A<\/kbd> was already taken by the &#8220;F<u>a<\/u>vorites<\/u>&#8221; menu. <\/p>\n<p>But why was it &#8220;F<u>a<\/u>vorites<\/u>&#8221; instead of &#8220;<u>F<\/u>avorites<\/u>&#8220;? <\/p>\n<p>Because the accelerator <kbd>Alt<\/kbd>+<kbd>F<\/kbd> was already taken by the &#8220;<u>F<\/u>ile&#8221; menu. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a really nerdy chain reaction. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because it was Ad&amp;dress.<\/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":[2],"class_list":["post-95727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Because it was Ad&amp;dress.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95727","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=95727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95727\/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=95727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}