This was one of the hardest pages to write. Why? Because I use these commands so often, without thinking, that when I stopped to think about them, I could hardly remember what they were.

So you might have to check this page every now and again as I remember some of my favorites.

Don’t care what my favorites are, or want to know more? Press Ctrl (or for Mac) + B to open opera:/help/keyboard.html.

Mac users: Unless otherwise noted, replace ctrl with below.

Shortcut involving F9, F10, or F11 are changed on Mac to avoid conflicts with Exposé.

Combining Shortcuts for Easier Reading

It seems that every read the number of un-readable pages vastly outnumbers the readable ones. It almost seems like this trend is stopping, and in my most optimistic days I think it may even be getting better, but there are still a large, large number of sites out there using 3 column table layouts with a narrow band of text in the middle surrounded by two columns of ads or “related information” (so they claim).

Opera makes it easier to read almost any webpage. Here are 3 techniques from easiest to most complex (even the most complex one is fairly easy, and all of them highlight abilities which are present in Opera and not (to my knowledge) present in other browsers.

CSS Based Printer Friendly Pages

Excellent web designers will include stylesheets which will format a web page for printing. This usually removes all extraneous information (navigation links, ads, etc).

Yes, I ought to add printer friendly CSS to this site. Once the series is finished that is one of my goals.

How do you take advantage of this feature? Simply press shift + p for Print Preview and Opera will display the page as it would come out from the printer. The only problem? Often web designers will set print fonts in pixels, often 12 or even 10 depending on how good their eyes are. Solution? Press 8 and Opera will increase zoom by 100% and then press 9 (decrease by 10%) or 0 (increase by 10%) as needed. If you get a horizontal scrollbar, press ctrl + F11 for Fit to Window Width.

Other Printer Friendly Pages

Many webpages don’t have a CSS printer friendly page, but do have a link which leads to a different, printer friendly version of the page. Here’s a keyboard trick, type this: , (pause briefly) and type print.

What will that do? The , will trigger Opera’s “Search for Link Text” feature and then the letters “p-r-i-n-t” says “Look for links on the page which contain the word “print” such as “Printer Friendly” (which is what most of the pages use for link text). Once the link is found, press enter to select the link, and then press 8, etc to increase the zoom (see above) as needed.

Entirely Non-Printer Friendly Pages

Ok, what about the vast number of pages out there without CSS based printer friendly stylesheets or alternate printer-friendly pages? This is where Opera really shines.

What will really save you time is if you combine several different, separate keyboard commands. Imagine a page like this: 3 columns, with the middle column being actual content, and the left and right columns being excessive ads or crosslinks. It can easily be overwhelming. Opera’s built-in features are ideally suited for this problem.

What you will need to do is combine several keystokes. You may not need all of these, and some of them may require you to make sure that you have pre-configured them to give you the options you want. But once you have set these options the way you want them, they will save you a lot of time in the long run. (This is one of those features of Opera which is hard to explain to new users, but experienced users miss whenever they try another browser.)

Ok, here is a complete set of commands which will render almost any page highly readable:

1. shift + g (toggle user/author mode) [needs to be configured, see below]
2. 8 (increase zoom by 100%) [if needed]
3. ctrl + F11 (toggle Fit to Window Width mode) [if needed]
4. space (scroll down) [if needed]

That seems like a lot of commands, but once you are familiar with them, you will be amazed how easily you can execute them (mouse users should also remember that Mouse Gestures are also available and customizable). You may need to adjust the zoom in step 2, but I find that most times 100% is a good, comfortable amount.

Now some people will say “But this makes the text fill up the entire width of the page! That’s not readable!” Well that’s why I recommend using Fit to Window Width mode, because you can then (if needed) resize the window to whatever width you find most readable. Personally I have no problems reading long lines of text, in fact I prefer it.

Now, to make the above sequence truly useful, you have to do some initial configuration of Opera. This only has to be done once, and we have covered the necessary steps in previous days. Most specifically you have to have configured Fonts and User Mode so that when you press shift + g and go from Author Mode to User Mode, the fonts will be what you prefer. If you set a large enough font, you may not even need the Zoom step at all.

So what seems like 4 steps may only be 1, if you configure Opera as you prefer it. From then on, any page can be instantly rendered more readable for you. I am not aware of any other browser which puts such power in as little as one simple set of keystrokes.

So the next time you come across one of those web pages with multiple tables for layout in 10pt font, don’t get mad, let Opera serve it up your way!

F12

One of Opera’s unique and most useful features is the F12 menu (Mac: alt + F12). By default it contains the following entries:

• Open all pop-ups
• Open pop-ups in background
• Block unwanted pop-ups
• Block all pop-ups
• Enable GIF Animation [note: also controls SVG animations]
• Enable sound in Web pages
• Enable Java
• Enable Plugins
• Enable JavaScript
• Enable Cookies
• Enable referrer logging
• Enable proxy servers
• Identify as Opera
• Identify as Mozilla
• Identify as Internet Explorer

Want to change one? Make your own? See Shortcuts for Keyboard or Mouse.

Did I forget one of your favorites? Add it below in the comments (wrap keyboard commands in <kbd> tags to style them as I have them).

See also: Using Opera without a Mouse (opera.com).

opera:about

Gives you all the information that you need for finding our about where certain files are found. For example if someone suggests that you edit your opera.ini or your search.ini but where are they? Or what if you want to backup your Opera installation? Where are your personal files (bookmarks, contacts, Notes, etc) stored? opera:about will tell you. Also information about what version and build you are using

opera:cache

Shows you the local copies of files which Opera has stored from web pages you have visited. In the left column is the name of the local file, in the middle column is the size in bytes, and in the right column is the original URL. Why on earth would you care? Well, if you have visited a page with an embedded movie (QuickTime, Flash, etc) you can look here and see what it is called, then open up your cache folder and copy it from there to your Desktop or wherever you want to save it.

“But wait!” you protest, “All this does it tell me the filename, it doesn’t give me the option to open the file or save it locally.” Yes, you’re right. Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to have those files linked so you could right click on the link and then open the file or save it somewhere else? Well yes, it would, but unfortunately that isn’t implemented (yet?). However, once you know the location of your Cache folder, you can easily find it there. And how do you find out where your Cache folder located? opera:about of course!

Advanced tip: Go to File → Work Offline and you can click on the URLs in opera:cache and have the local copy opened.

opera:history

I include this for completeness sake (and to avoid having people tell me that I forgot it) but it isn’t very useful compared to Tools → History which has a quick search feature.

opera:plugins

Plugins (most notably Flash, but also QuickTime, Shockwave, etc) control some of the content that we love (and hate) about the web. To view this content, you need the appropriate plugin. This page shows what Opera has found to be installed. If you are having problems getting something to run, be sure that Opera finds the appropriate plugin.

None of these features are enough to make anyone switch to Opera, but they are handy tools to have when you are using Opera and need to do some troubleshooting.

For example, double click on some text (or click-drag to select text and then right-click) and here’s what you’ll see:

Windows:

Mac OS X:

Copy Text

The good old reliable copy option, just like you’ve been used to in pretty much every application that deals with text in any way. If you don’t know what that is, I’m not sure I can explain it to you… in fact, you’re probably unable to read this.

Copy to note

You do remember Day 19: Notes, right? Well here ya go, take the text you have selected and make it into a Note.

Speak (Windows only)

In conjunction with IBM, Opera for Windows has the ability to speak text (and respond to verbal commands). Cool, eh? Yeah, we’ll talk more about that later, but what you need to know here is that you can just grab some text and have it read to you while you… well, who knows… read your email? File that stack of papers that’s been sitting on your desk for a month?

Search

Take the selected text and search in the default search engine (the default is Google, or as defined in search.ini.)

Search with

Gives you the option to search any of the search engines defined in your search.ini file. Default search engines are Google, Opera Web(s), Amazon, Price Comparison, Ebay.com, Download.com, Google groups, Google News, and Opera support. (You might want to look at the default search.ini if you want to modify your custom search.ini to include some of the above)

Dictionary

Look up selected word in the dictionary, defined in, get this, search.ini!

Encyclopedia

(You can kinda see where this is going, right?) Look up the selected word in the encyclopedia.

Translate

Take selected text, translate it into another language.

Go to URL

Take selected text and open it as an URL. This is handy on forums and comment boards where people may post an URL but are not allowed to make proper <A HREF links.

Send by mail

Take the selected text and enter it as the body of a new email message, using the <TITLE> as the Subject: of the message. (Note: Opera doesn’t include the URL in the message, which seems like a bug to me.)

They used to say “Let your fingers do the walking” but why stop there? With Opera you can let your fingers do the searchin’

Simply put, Opera’s Delete Private Data menu will allow you to delete any information stored in Opera.

“Delete Private Data” is found in the “Tools” menu. Selecting it will bring up this menu:

Windows:

Mac OS X:

That’s what the window looks like before you press the “Advanced” button. I suggest that you press the “Advanced” button to see the specific choices:

Windows:

Mac OS X:

Note that initially all of the options are checked except for email and wand passwords. This will give you a quick, thorough cleaning, but it might also be more than you need. For example, I never want to clear the history of typed-in addresses or visited links. I like to keep track of that history information. Why would anyone want to delete that information? Well, if you were using Opera in a public terminal (library, hotel lounge, etc) then this would be a good thing to do before you log off - and you might want to delete the Wand passwords too.

Simply select or unselect the boxes next to the information you want to keep or delete, and then click the Delete button.

Voila! Your tracks have been erased.

Advanced Security Notes

1. Cache files are not securely deleted, so it may be possible for someone to recover them using disk recovery tools. However, the chances of your spouse/roommate/mother finding out what sites you have been visiting is close to 0.
2. Once you have customized the selections using the Advanced menu, those options are retained for future use but the text of the simple dialog (see first screen shot above) does not change. This may be considered a bug or a feature:
   • To those who see it as a bug, the fact that the choices are retained yet the simple dialog does not change may lead to security problems. Here is an example: imagine you want to just clear your cache, so you go to Tools > Delete Private Data > Advanced and uncheck all of the boxes except “Delete entire cache”. Now the next time you go to use “Delete Private Data” you do not use the Advanced button, but simply read the text and see that it says “Proceeding will clear your entire browsing history” which is no longer true, because you had previously unchecked the boxes next to clear history of visited pages, etc. (Some even consider it a security concern to tell people what options you had checked or unchecked!)
   • Those who consider this a feature, it enables you to choose the settings that you want once and have them applied every time you use “Delete Private Data.”
   • My recommendation is that if you ever use the “Advanced” button, make sure that you always use it.

Features I’d Like To See

• If I use the Advanced Options, automatically open the window to the advanced version.
• If a user chooses options besides the defaults, automatically open the advanced version so they are not confused by the text in the simple menu (which may no longer be accurate).
• Let the user decide what happens after the “Delete Private Data” window closes: Select All, Select None, Select Default, or Keep My Choices.

We’ve already seen on Day 8: Fit to window width that Opera can adjust any webpage to the size of the window. But what if you want to see Opera all over the entire screen, or see what your site looks like on Opera-enabled cell phones?

Enter Small Screen and Full Screen Rendering.

Small Screen and Full Screen. Ok, just two things, but they’re a big deal (well, one big deal, and one little one :-)

Small Screen

Opera introduced Small Screen rendering to turn the wireless web from an idea into a reality. No longer were mobile phones constrained to specially designed sites. Opera reformatted websites so they could be viewed on small screens. (Opera is available for almost any mobile phone via Opera Mini.)

So what do you do if you want to see how Opera’s Small Screen Rendering works on your site? Or what if you don’t have a cell phone with any sort of Internet access? Simple! Just activate Small Screen Rendering in Opera for the Desktop! (It’s also handy for turning some pages into Panels.)

Full Screen

There are times you really want to focus just on browsing, to see as much of a page as you can. Simple enter into Full Screen Mode and Opera will fill the screen for your browsing pleasure. Press F11 (Windows) or Alt + F11 (Mac) to enter full screen mode. (Use the same command, or ESC, to exit Full Screen Mode.)

Mac users: this is a true full-screen mode, which will cover the Dock and Menu Bar. Opera does not support the “Zoom Window” function found in OS X native apps which cause the app to fill up all the space except the menu bar and Dock. Hopefully this will be supported in a later version of Mac Opera. However, MacOpera is (to my knowledge) the only Mac browser to offer a true full-screen mode.

Now I love full-screen mode and use it all the time, especially when I am using a laptop. But I often want access to the Address Bar (see Day 21: Toolbars). Opera can do that. In Windows, press ctrl + F8. In Mac, press cmd + F8. Repeat the command to hide the addressbar again.

For the CSS-savvy users out there: Full Screen Mode also will put Opera into “projection” mode which is also used for Opera Show.

Cycle Pages

Cycle here means “Switch back and forth” so what this preference is asking is “How do you want to switch between pages?”

How do you switch between pages? you ask. Excellent question! Of course you can switch between them by clicking on them with the mouse. But Advanced Opera8tors (my cute nickname for advanced Opera users…) may want to use their keyboard shortcuts or use mouse gestures.

For example, if you press ctrl + tab (or, if you use a mouse with a scroll-wheel, hold the right button down and turn the wheel), Opera will show a listing of the currently open tabs, like this:

By using the “Cycle Pages” option, you can choose how this feature works:

1. Cycle in recently used order (default, and my recommendation)
2. Cycle in page bar order
3. Cycle without showing list

The first says “Switch back and forth between pages using the order that I have used them” on the theory that the pages that you have recently looked at are the most important ones to you.

The second says “I am very neat and orderly, and I want to switch beween pages in the order that I created them.” In reality, few people actually are that linear, especially on the web.

Number three is good for those of you who are paid by the millisecond and have a fast graphics card. You don’t have any time to waste with a list popping up and choosing something, you just jump in with guns a-blazin’. It will switch to the previous page without a popup list at all.

Loading

Ok, minor nit: This ought to be called “Redrawing” because all the options are about when Opera should redraw the page. The good news is that in most cases you won’t ever need to change this. The default (1 second) should be fine, unless you have a slow computer and a slow connection, in which case you may want to adjust the settings and see if Opera seems to respond better.

Redrawing does take CPU time, so if Opera feels a little sluggish on page loading, try tweaking this. You might find the overall experience feels a little faster, even with the redrawing is slowed. If you have a fairly recent computer and decent graphics card, you can remove the delay entirely. Play around with it. You can always change it back later.

Don’t be afraid of changing settings in Opera. Play around with it. Change a setting, and then see how it works. There’s a lot Opera can do, but you’ll never learn what it can do without a little tinkering around. I’m not so much an expert as I am someone who has poked around a lot.

Page icons

3 options

1. Embedded icons and favicons (default, and best option)
2. Embedded icons only
3. Show no icons

Again, I don’t know of any good reason to use #2. You’d only use #3 if you had some strong personal distaste for favicons, which I can’t really understand, they make it a bit easier to identify pages/tabs. (Hrm… that reminds me, I need a favicon for this site.)

If you’re thinking that turning off icons would save you some room on the Tabs, sorry it does not. You just get a little generic icon instead. If Opera did remove that icon, then I could see a minor argument for disabling icons. But really, just leave them alone.

(However, if you do want to turn off the icons on the page bar, you can do that. Simply right click on one of the tabs, click “Customize” and then look for “Style”… choose “Text Only” and then click “OK” and the icons will be gone from the tabs).

New Pages

Now here are some fun new options to play with (although you’ll probably want the default at the end)

1. Remember last size
2. Always maximize (default, keep it)
3. Always maximize, including pop-ups
4. Always cascade
5. Tile all automatically

Ok, if you want a few seconds of “Pure Geek Fun” ™ then set your preference to “Tile all automatically” and then start opening new pages. It’s a very cool effect, with almost no practical purpose at all.

“Always cascade” might be cool if you are a super-hardcore MDI geek. If you don’t know what MDI is, you probably won’t care at all about this option.

“Always maximize, including pop-ups” is a bit confusing if you think about it, since “always” would seem to include all types of pages. But pop-ups are a different case. If you were to choose any other option than ”Always maximize” I think this would be it. Why is this useful? There are several sites out there (CNN.com comes to mind) which open “printer friendly” versions of their pages in a new page, not maximized. If you are going to read the printer-friendly version (as I prefer) then you may want to set that option. On the other hand, if you generally work with something like weblog software that uses a small pop-up window, you should leave it on the default.

More Options

A few of these options are very important to people, and a few of them are completely unimportant to people. The trick is that people disagree on which are vital and which aren’t! So I’ll give you my take on them and you can decide for yourself

Reuse existing page (default on; TjL prefers off)

To me this is an absolutely essential setting that I immediately set whenever I install a new version of Opera. The default is on and I turn it off. I like working with a lot of pages at once, and I see no reason to reuse a page when I can use a new one. After all, they are a completely renewable resource, so why not splurge a little :-?

Note: Bookmarklets/Favelets on the toolbars will not work if this is turned OFF. This has been filed as a bug. See comments below for some workarounds.

Why do I turn this off? Because when it is off, I can easily choose whether or not I want to reuse an existing page. How? Simple. Say I goto a page such as “www.opera.com” and then I decide I want to go to “my.opera.com”. There are two ways of doing this via the keyboard: F2 (which will open a small “Go to page” window where you can enter an URL) or press F8 which will take you to the addressbar.

With “Reuse existing page” turned on, both F2 and F8 will cause the new URL to be loaded in the same page.

With “Reuse existing page” turned off, F2 will open a new page and F8 will reuse the existing page.

Of course you can also choose File > New Page or click on the “New Page” button regardless of the preference setting, but why would you use the mouse when you can use the keyboard ;-? Press ctrl/ + n to open a new page.

(Note: this setting has no effect when clicking on links which are designed to open in new pages, either through HTML or JavaScript. It only controls the behavior as described above.)

Open new page next to active (default is off; TjL prefers on)

This one is a little hard to explain, but let me try to give an example. Assume you have three pages (tabs) open: Google, CNN, and Wired. And let’s assume that you are reading CNN when you see a link to another page (which we’ll call “CNN1”) that you want to open in a new page. So you shift+click it (or right click and choose “open in new page”). Normally, the new page would be opened next to the Wired page, so the order of the pages would be: Google, CNN, Wired, CNN1, as shown here:

However, with this option turned on, the new page would be opened next to the existing CNN page (since that one is active), and the order would be: Google, CNN, CNN1, and Wired, as shown here:

I prefer this method because it keeps related pages next to each other.

Show scrollbars (default on; TjL prefers on)

Rather self-evidently, this option lets you turn the scrollbars (horizontal or vertical) on or off. I can’t think of a good reason to turn this off, but if scrollbars offend you, now you will no longer have to see them.

Smooth scrolling (default on; TjL prefers off)

With this option on, Opera makes scrolling… um… smoother. (Ok so you probably didn’t need me for this one.) I know I’ll shock people when I say this, but smooth scrolling always distracts me, whereas un-smooth scrolling acts exactly as I expect that it would. So this is probably a case where I disagree with the majority, and that’s ok, because Opera gives me the option to turn it off. Find a long page and turn this option on/off and use your page up/down buttons to scroll and see which you prefer.

Show window size (default off; TjL prefers off)

With this on, Opera reports the size of the page (note: it’s the page size, not the window size. That’s a minor error in Opera’s user-interface if you ask me). The sizes are reported as two 3-digit numbers, measured in pixels. This feature is handy for web designers who are trying to make sure that a page will render properly at certain sizes, but most people will safely ignore this option. (Note: the size will be shown in the window bar at the top of the main window.)

Show tooltips (default on; TjL prefers on)

As much as some people love smooth scrolling and can’t imagine why anyone would turn it off, I feel the same way about tooltips. Opera will show tooltips when hovering links and so forth. Tooltips offer very valuable information (Title and address of link, for starters) and I highly recommend you leave this on. If you decide to turn this off, you may want to turn the Status Bar on by going to View > Toolbars > Status Bar. Better still, turn the Status Bar on and leave the tooltips on.

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So that’s the Help Menu. Don’t forget about the built-in Opera help search functions (see Day 20: search.ini for a reminder).

Don’t forget: registered customers get email support. Login to https://support.opera.com/bin/customer/.

Hey, if Opera is breaking all the rules, we can too :-)

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