About AltPlusCtrl
AltPlusCtrl started from a fairly mundane annoyance. Praveen, who builds and runs this site from Berlin, Germany, spends most working days moving between a spreadsheet, a code editor, a couple of design tools, and a video call. Each of those apps has its own shortcut scheme, its own conventions for whatCtrlorCmddoes, and its own buried help page listing them — assuming it has one at all. The actual moment this site got started was after the third time in one week spent Googling "excel go to cell shortcut" because the muscle memory from VS Code kept taking over.
That's a small problem, but it's a common one, and the existing solutions online were mostly the same thing repeated: a screenshot of a keyboard with labels, or a long unformatted list copy-pasted from a vendor's documentation with no way to practice it. Knowing a shortcut exists and actually having it become automatic under your fingers are two different things, and almost nothing online addressed the second part.
So AltPlusCtrl is built around three things instead of one:
- A genuinely thorough shortcut reference covering both the apps almost everyone uses (Excel, Word, Photoshop, VS Code, Chrome) in real depth, and a long tail of more specialized tools, each with real, checked key combinations for Windows and Mac — not just one platform with the other as an afterthought.
- The Shortcut Trainer, because reading a list doesn't build muscle memory. It shows you an action, you press the actual keys, and it tracks what you keep getting wrong so those resurface more often than the ones you already know.
- A cheat sheet generator for people who just want a printed reference taped next to their monitor for the first couple of weeks with a new tool, free, and a paid custom version for anyone who wants it built around their specific stack rather than assembled by hand.
This is a small, independently operated site — not a venture-funded product with a roadmap team. New apps get added when there's real demand for them, and the whole thing stays free because the goal was solving an actual daily annoyance, not building a subscription business around keyboard shortcuts.
Accuracy & corrections
Every shortcut on this site is checked against the app's current version at the time it's written or last reviewed — but software vendors change key bindings. A shortcut that was correct in last year's release can silently stop working, get reassigned, or gain a platform-specific exception after an update, and there's no practical way to re-verify 266+ apps against every new release the moment it ships. That means accuracy here is an ongoing process, not a one-time claim that everything is permanently correct — the same limitation every shortcut reference has, whether it admits it or not.
If a shortcut is wrong for your version of an app, or you notice a key binding that changed after an update, email contact@altplusctrl.com with the app, the shortcut, and what's actually correct now. Corrections get made directly in the underlying data, not queued behind a review process — most get fixed within a few days of being reported. It gets read by an actual person, not a support queue.
If AltPlusCtrl saved you the trip to a vendor's help docs, that's the whole point. Contact works the same way for anything else — a missing app, a broken page, or general feedback.