How to Create Keyboard Shortcut Key to Launch Windows 10 Apps Quickly

There are two ways to create a keyboard shortcut key for launching Windows 10 apps quickly. Let’s look at them right away.

Traditional Windows Apps

Also known as Win32 apps, these are the apps that we have been installing all these years. Press Next, Next, Next and finally Finish, and your application gets installed.

These applications normally place a shortcut on your desktop screen. To create keyboard shortcut keys for such apps, please follow these steps.

Right-click the shortcut icon of any app and click on properties from the context menu. In figure 1, I’ve right-clicked on the Mozilla Thunderbird app.

Create Keyboard Shortcut Key

See Figure 2. Select the Shortcut tab and click in the Shortcut Key field. Press the keyboard keys that you would like to create a shortcut key for this app. I have selected “Ctrl + Alt + M” as my shortcut key. To enter this key combination, press the “Ctrl” key and keep it pressed down. Press the “Alt” key while keeping the “Ctrl” key pressed down. And lastly, press the ‘M’ key while keeping the last two keys pressed down.

Modern Windows Apps

Also known as Microsoft Store apps and Metro-style apps, these are the apps that were introduced starting Windows 8.

They don’t place any shortcut icon on the desktop. You have to launch them from Start Menu.

Let’s suppose we want to create a shortcut key for the Weather app. What we have to do first is to drag this app from Start Menu and drop it to Desktop.

It will create a familiar shortcut icon on the desktop. You can double click on this icon to launch the Weather app.

But we are interested in creating a shortcut key for this app. So we are going to right-click on this icon, select Properties, click on the Shortcut Key field, and press keyboard keys that we want just like we had done for traditional Windows apps.

You might be interested in this article: How to Transfer Files From Laptop to Laptop in Windows 10.