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April 28, 2005

The Miracle that is the Hotclick - The Wonder that is Ctrl-D - George Harrison

In my opinion, one of the most under-used but powerful features in Opera is (what could it be?) Hotclick. Basically it allows you select a piece of text and open a context menu that gives you a huge number of options as to what you can do with it. In most cases this involves click on a word, but I often use it for things like selecting URLs formatted in plain text (and then Go to URL) and selecting phrases to search with. With a customised search.ini, you can not only change what dictionary and encyclopedia you use, you can also search using any number of search engines. Like so:

hotclick.gif

For a very good intro tutorial to the ins and outs of Hotclick, have a look at nontroppo's Visual Tutorial. As I've mentioned, he has a whole series of them. I wonder if his name has anything to do with George Harrison's "Gone Troppo".

What this basically does is eliminate the need for you to copy and paste items into your search boxes, unless of course they're from outside Opera, in which case let me introduce to you the evolution of ctrl-v - ctrl-d! What ctrl-d does is "paste and go", so you don't have to click on "go" or press enter after you paste. Isn't Opera fun? To find out more keyboard shortcuts, just press F1 in Opera to go to the Help page. If you really want to kick it up a notch, you can learn how to navigate using the keyboard only - which is more useful than you'd think.

Posted by subtitles at April 28, 2005 4:32 AM | Opera Boggling

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Comments

Non troppo means "moderately" or "not too much". Itallian, of course. Sorry, was bugging me yesterday what it meant, had to google it. Anyways, love your site, I can't help but keep coming back for more. Keep it up.

Posted by: Andrew Hughes at April 28, 2005 5:19 AM