Finding hidden application keyboard shortcuts

I vaguely recall reading about a utility that will "discover" keyboard shortcuts that are already coded into an application but for whatever reason are not either a) visible on-screen with the underlined letter convention, or b) not documented.

I'm not talking about the XP setting to display the underlined letters, but rather shortcuts that have somehow been overlooked or "missed" having the underlined letter "applied" in the code (e.g., for an alt+key, maybe the name of the button was changed from "enter" to "start", so there's no more letter "N" for the shortcut but in fact it still works even though it's not displayed).

Maybe I'm dreaming ... anybody?

 

Thanks, JRViejo, but nope, that's not quite it. I'm meaning the shortcuts that are coded into a particular application, specific to that app's functionality.

e.g. in Firefox, viewing the History is Ctl+Shift+H. Many functions in FF also have Alt-key combos for the same action. But in FF there isn't an Alt-key equivalent, there's only Alt+s to get to the history menu, but the second part to view the history doesn't have an Alt key combo.

I've seen other apps that are like this, it's as if the programmers just forgot to finish off their Alt-key coding for all the menu items, or as I speculated, maybe if the names of the menu items were changed, the programmers couldn't adjust the keys to be one of the letters in the new name without having to rework other key assignments, so they just dropped it. So while the menu item "Show All History" might still be accessible via Alt+z, but without the letter "z" in the text and without having any documentation to that effect, a user would not have any idea that there was such an Alt+ key for any particular action.

I thought I remembered there being some sort of a "key discovery" utility that you could point at an application and it could spit out a list of the Alt+ keys, or Ctl+ keys, that were active for the app.

 

Hi axial,

Try going to these sites and searching for 'keyboard shortcut'. I'm getting many hits especially for Firefox. Maybe one of the app/addon names will ring a bell.

http://www.softpedia.com/ and http://www.majorgeeks.com/

Edit: I know you were looking for an application, but I also found a couple of useful shortcut links.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard shortcuts Firefox shortcuts
http://www.keyxl.com/ A shortcut database
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/keyboard.aspx Shortcuts for MS products

 

I think I may have found some possible utils, still testing, but this is the discovery trail:

http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/17/keyboard-shortcuts/

http://www.bcheck.net/apps/hoe.htm

http://hkcmdr.anymania.com/