Maximising a Window Without Using the Mouse

One of the questions that people often ask me is about the keyboard equivalent of clicking on the buttons in the top right hand corner of a Window to minimise or maximise it. Well what you need to do is to access a special menu which is often called the "application control menu".

You do this by pressing alt + the spacebar. The menu drops down from the top left hand corner and gives you a number of options each with its own access key (the underlined letter) :

• maximise (x),
• minimise (n).

For example:

• ALT+SPACEBAR then X, maximises the current application window;
• ALT+SPACEBAR then R, restores the current application window to the size it was before being maximised;
• ALT+SPACEBAR then N, minimizes the current application window.