Control Zero!
Amazing what a relief it is to be free of what you thought was just a little nagging itch. The other day, Anne sent me over to Derek Featherstone’s list of favorite Firefox keyboard shortcuts. I was reading through them, nodding along with Ctrl+T and Alt+D, when I came to
- Ctrl + 0 “zero�
- Recently discovered. Resets text size back to default. Ultimately convenient when switching back to testing/developing from casual reading.
Wow! I’ve always loved Firefox’s ability to shrink (rarely) or enlarge (mostly) any text with Ctrl+- and Ctrl++, unlike IE’s refusal to change fonts sized in pixels — I read far too many weblogs written by young web designers, who think that 10px dark grey text on a light grey background is perfectly legible — but it’s a little annoying not being sure when you’ve reset the font size to the original. Far more annoying is the way that for some reason Ctrl plus my trackpad’s scroll bar, in either direction, very quickly shrinks text down to the minimum size. I don’t much care about having it shrink and enlarge, but when I accidently hit it, having to Ctrl++ back up to some random size around the original is a pain. No biscuit for Firefox for not giving me any way to discover Ctrl+0, and a whole boxful for Derek, for telling me the two keys that get me back to reading.
That keyboard shortcut is actually listed in the Firefox help file in the Keyboard Shortcuts page. It’s listed as ”Restore Text Size” in the table. But, I didn’t know either until you pointed it out, so thank you. Perhaps I should check the help more often, rather than assuming I already know how to use it. There’s a few other cool shortcuts listed there too.