The Opera browser is great for a number of reasons. A superior rendering engine, good memory management, and a wealth of functions that provide a great browsing experience. But what I appreciate most about Opera are its keyboard shortcuts. You can get a list of keyboard shortcuts from Opera Help, (Press F1). Here I'd like to highlight some of the most useful and interesting shortcuts.
Zoom!
For me, zooming is one of the most important features in a browser. You can customize the size of the text and images and no other web browser does it better. Firefox has a zoom feature. By default, only text can be zoomed in Firefox. You can add an extension that'll do images as well, but the rendering on Firefox just does work well. The text will overlap, the granularity of the zoom is coarse, and the pages many times just ends up unreadable. Internet Explorer is a joke when it comes to zooming. In Opera, you can specify the zoom level in increments of 10%.
| Decrease | Increase | |
| Zoom +/- 10% | Minus [-] Keypad [-] [9] |
Keypad [+] [0] |
| Zoom +/- 100% | Ctrl + Keypad [-] [7] |
Ctrl + Keypad [+] [8] |
Pressing the [6] or the Keypad [*] key will restore the zoom level to the original 100%.
Incidentally, pressing [F11], will bring you to full screen mode. This will be handy at times when you're using zoom.
Fit to Width Ctrl-[F11]
Often times, web pages have text that scroll off the screen, causing you to have to scroll left and right to read the contents. This often happens when you use the zoom feature. Ctrl-[F11] is a toggle key that turns off and on the "Fit to Width" feature which renders the web page such that everything fits nicely on the screen so that you don't have to scroll left and right. No other web browser can do this and Opera does it very well.
Navigating Links
If you press [/] and start typing the browser will search for text and move the page as you type. It's a quicker way to search than the traditional Ctrl-[f] find function. However, there is a lesser known function that works on searching only links.
If you press [,] or [.] and start typing, the same type of search will occur but only text with associated links will be searched. Once the link you want is highlighted, simply press [Enter], to "click" the link. Pressing Ctrl-[Enter] opens the link in a new tab. Pressing Ctrl-Shift-[Enter] opens the link in a new tab in the background.
You can scroll around the page by links using , [A] and [Q], or Ctrl-[Down Arrow] and Ctrl-[Up Arrow]. You can also navigate using the Shift-[up,down,left,right Arrow] keys. I use these all the time because I hate using the mouse! Again, once you get to the desired link, you can press [Enter] to "click" the link.
Using Nicknames
When you bookmark a link, a useful thing to do is to assign a nickname. You can do so by pressing the "Details>>" button after selecting "Bookmark Page", and filling in the field. Once you have a nickname for a bookmark you can go to that page by pressing Shift-[F2] and type in the nickname. The best part of this function is that Opera is smart enough to figure out the nickname as you type. So, if you for example only have one nickname assigned that starts with the letter "O", then as soon as you type "O", it will load the page. If more than one nickname starts with the same letter, then you only have to type until the nickname is unique. For example, if you have two nicknames, one called "opera", and another one called "outpost", then typing "op" will load the Opera page, and typing "ou" will load the outpost page. Very convenient, because with a little creativity, you can name things in a way that gives the most commonly used pages the shortest amount of keystrokes.
Page Back and Forward Keys
Opera has several keys that do the same thing for going forward and backward in your browsing history. Here are the pairs for backward and forward:
| Page Back | Page Forward |
| [z] Alt-[left arrow] Ctrl-[left arrow] Ctrl-[ [ ] left bracket |
[x] Alt-[right arrow] Ctrl-[right arrow] Ctrl-[ ] ] right bracket |
Pressing Alt-[z] brings up a list of backwards history of web pages, and Alt-[x] shows a forwards history of web pages.
If you are reading an article with a series of pages, pressing Shift-[x] will take you to the next page. This works by looking for a link with the keyword "next" (you can configure what keywords it looks for as well). If there is a link on the page labeled next, Shift-[x] will assume that takes you to the next page in the article. To see how this works, go to Google.com and do a search. Notice that there is a link for the next page of search results. Press Shift-[x], and you will "magically" be taken to the next page of search results.
TABS
Ctrl-[T] opens a new tab (Ctrl-[N] for a tab in a new window), and Ctrl-[W] closes a tab. To navigate through your tabs from left to right and right to left, you can press the [1], and [2] keys. To cycle through the tabs in the order you last viewed them, use Ctrl-[Tab], and Ctrl-Shift-[Tab].
Typing in Web Page Addresses
Ctrl-[L], or [F8] will bring you to the address bar where you can type in the new web address you want to load. [F2] brings up a dialog box where you can do the same thing. [H] works like [F8] and Ctrl-[L], but it also opens the drop down list with a history of web pages that changes as you type.
Miscellaneous
Ctrl-[U] - erases all the text in text box that you are currently in. It works on the web pages as well as Opera specific menus and dialog boxes. This is one of my favorites, but hardly anyone knows about it!
Ctrl-[F7] - toggles the scroll bars
[F4] - toggles the side bar.
Ctrl-[Backspace] - Moves up one level based on Web Address. Ex. http://www.opera.com/support/ becomes http://www.opera.com/.
Shift-[P] - Print preview
Ctrl-Alt-[B] - Open bookmark page
Ctrl-Alt-[H] - Open history page
Ctrl-[Space] - Go to your home page designated in Preferences (Alt-P), under "General"
Ctrl-[R] - Reload the current page.
[F12] - Quick preferences.
Well, this by no means a comprehensive list. But keyboard shortcuts are difficult for people to remember so I tried to highlight some of the ones that I use the most. The Opera browser is a great browser for people who use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. On top of that, I think it's the best browser available today. If you're not using Opera, you should at least try it out. Get it here!
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