The most powerful key on the keyboard...
One of the amazing things about software is that it's possible to use it for years and years and years without discovering major features that have been hiding in there all along:
- Open up any Windows application that contains a tree view control (Windows Explorer, Visual Studio, etc.)
- Select any node in the tree view.
- Press the * key on your numeric keypad.
- Watch with glee as the tree node and all of its children are expanded.
- Now press the - key on your numeric keypad.
- Watch with slightly less glee since this one is pretty easy to anticipate once you've seen the first one.
I've written and tested more than my fair share of tree view code over the years. (In fact, Codify uses more tree views than should be legally allowed in a single application.) In all this time I had no idea that these little gizmos were sitting there on my keyboard waiting to save me hundreds and thousands of mouse clicks.
Maybe some of these other keys are useful too...