How To Make Windows Underline and Highlight Menu Shortcut Keys [Tutorial]
15How To Make Windows Underline and Highlight Menu Shortcut Keys [Tutorial]
On Windows 11, the underline keyboard shortcut is a feature that has been around for a long time, and it enables you to quickly navigate menus and select items of applications without the need to use the mouse.
Microsoft has always included keyboard shortcuts for navigating the operating system, but remembering them isn’t practical. To make it easier, some of the programs do include shortcut keys in the menu. You can make it even easier by making Windows underline shortcut keys on menu items. This feature is disabled by default, but it’s easy to enable – here’s how.
This feature doesn’t enable shortcut keys everywhere you might expect, but it does work on most of the context menus (those you get by right-clicking files or folders) in Windows and some apps. In some apps (like File Explorer and Microsoft Office apps), you can activate similar shortcut keys by hitting your Alt key. Whether you do that or use the Ease of Access feature we’re talking about here, you can easily use your arrow keys to move around in menu and hit the underlined letter to execute a command on those menus.
The feature works by underlining a letter of the option label, which indicates the key you need to press in combination with the "Alt" key to select the item. In previous versions, the underline access keys functionality was enabled by default, but now it is a feature that you must turn on manually.
This tutorial will apply for computers, laptops, desktops, and tablets running the Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems (Home, Professional, Enterprise, Education) from all supported hardware manufactures, like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, Alienware, Razer, MSI, Huawei , Microsoft Surface, and Samsung.