it does not mean pressing the ctrl key oncefollowed by pressing the key you can discover the common shortcutssuch as ctrl- to save and ctrl- to copyby using the mouse to open the menu bar at the top of the application (in windows and linuxor top of the screen (in macosit' well worth the time to learn and use these keyboard shortcuts other shortcuts are not so obvious for examplealt-tab on windows and linux and command-tab on macos allow you to switch focus to another application' window you can hold the alt or command key down and repeatedly press tab to select specific window to switch to copying and pasting the clipboard is feature of your operating system that can temporarily store data for pasting while this data can be textimagesfilesor other types of informationwe'll be dealing with text data in this section copying text places copy of the currently selected text onto the clipboard pasting text enters the text on the clipboard into wherever the text cursor currently isas though you had instantly typed it yourself copying and pasting text frees you from having to retype text that already exists on your computerwhether it' single line or hundreds of pages to copy and paste textfirst selector highlightthe text to copy you can do this by holding down the primary mouse button (which is the left buttonif the mouse is set for right-handed usersand dragging over the text to select it howeverholding down the shift key and moving the cursor with the keyboard shortcuts is often faster and more precise many applications allow you to double-click word to immediately select the entire word you can also often triple-click to immediately select an entire line or paragraph the next step is to press ctrl- on windows or command- on macos to copy the selected text to the clipboard the clipboard can only hold one selection of textso copying text replaces anything that was previously on the clipboard finallymove the cursor to where you want the text to appear and press ctrl- on windows or command- on macos to paste the text you can paste as many times as you wantthe text remains on the clipboard until you copy new text to replace it finding and replacing text dan russella search anthropologist at googleexplained in atlantic article that when he studied people' computer usage habits percent of them didn' know they could press ctrl- (on windows and linuxor command- (on macosto search for words in their applications this is an incredibly useful featurenot just in code editorsbut in word processorsweb browsersspreadsheet applicationsand almost every kind xxiv introduction