When working in a Windows environment, I can't help but appreciate all the different things I can do. When you right click your mouse and bring up a context menu, there's a wealth of options. It got too crazy, maybe, so now there's two menus full of options. There's the new context menu, with less options and bigger icons, and then there's the old context menu, which you can get by choosing "Show more options" from the first context menu. All the things you can do at the click of a mouse can be mind boggling. Imagine if you're a new user, trying to navigate the Windows interface, with all the different things it lets you do without even touching the keyboard. I haven't used Mac systems in a long time. Back when I used them, it was MacOS Classic. I haven't used OSX much. Macs though, the approach to the user experience is so different. Only one mouse button. Point and click. The barrier to entry for computer usage is much lower that way. People might be less intimidated with a barrage of options of things they can do. I can appreciate that whenever I right click anything in Windows. Even if I've done it a million times, being presented with all the options can still be a bit much. The new context menu is slightly better because it gives you the more common options up front, and it loads a bit faster. About shortcuts in Windows. There are different ways to make them, different types of shortcuts, and all sorts of things that shortcuts can do. In days past, when Windows users who never cared to download a second web browser were rocking the web, they used Internet Explorer. If you dragged a website address from the browser URL to the desktop, you might get an "internet shortcut" instead your run of the mill shortcut. It also depends on your system settings though. You might get a regular shortcut anyway, depending on how things are configured. Of course you can also right click somewhere and choose New -> Shortcut as well. Then, type in the location of the thing you want the shortcut to point to. You can also perform a "right drag" on a file or folder. Hold down your right mouse button, drag an item somewhere, then release the button. You get a context menu which gives you an option to create a shortcut. Another way to make a shortcut is with a left drag. While you are dragging a file or folder, hold down the alt key. Then, when you release your mouse button, you get a shortcut. If you like menu bars, and you probably do if you're coming from the world of Macs, you'll notice there's a "New" menu in the menu bar of folder windows as well. You can also create a shortcut from there. Manually creating shortcuts is boring though. You might want to have some shortcut creation automation. You can do it with PowerShell. Do something along the lines of "New-Object -COM WScript.Shell" to get a shell object, then you can call "CreateShortcut" and pass it the path of the shortcut file you want to create. Next set the TargetPath property. Finally, call the "Save" method. It's COM, so you can pick your COM enabled programming language of choice and make shortcuts to your heart's content. Shortcuts in Windows get more interesting still, because the path that they point to doesn't have to be a fixed value. After creating the shortcut, get properties on it and you can change the target, under the "Shortcut" tab. In the target, you can put an environment variable, surrounded by percent signs, as is the custom for designating environment variables in Windows. So for example, put %SHORTCUT_TARGET% there, and then whatever the SHORTCUT_TARGET environment variable is set to, that's what gets opened when you open the shortcut. You can make the variable the whole target or part of the target. For example, you could put C:\%MY_DIR% then the variable might refer to a location in the root of the C drive. Or, it could refer to a whole path that's somewhere in C only. Shortcuts can refer to web addresses. Make your target https://www.example.com/ and then when you open the shortcut, it goes to that address. Let's say you had an environment variable that contains something you want to search the internet for. Put in your shortcut something like "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%SEARCH_TERM%". Now, when you open that shortcut, it searches Duck Duck Go for whatever is in the SEARCH_TERM environment variable. Very convenient. It seems convenience is the name of the game when you are working in Windows. You can also put environment variables in the "Start in" field to make the working directory a variable value too. As Billy Mays would say, "But wait, there's more!" what more is there to know about shortcuts, you might think. How about ways to open them? If you place your shortcut in the start menu folder (%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs") then your shortcut appears in the start menu. There's another advantage to placing your shortcuts in the start menu though. Get properties on the shortcut there, in the Shortcut tab you'll also see a "Shortcut Key". This is a keyboard shortcut that you can press to make the shortcut open. You could assign, for example, Ctrl-Alt-5 to open your shortcut that searches the internet. If your shortcut contains an environment variable, why, all the more convenient that it can be. All you'd have to do is think of some interesting situations where you might want an value to be readily available to you, and set the environment variable you want accordingly, then assign a keyboard shortcut to the variable. Off you go, you'll feel like a power user. People will think you can do magic, pressing shortcut keys and things coming up with the system at your beck and call.