Microsoft Paint

Yes, it's everyone's favourite graphics editor, Microsoft Paint.

While looking around the internets, I discovered a number of features in Paint that a lot of people don't know about..

The tertiary colour
Most people know that you can pick a primary and secondary colour in Paint - primary is left-click, secondary is right-click. But did you know there is a tertiary colour controlled by CTRL+click?

The tertiary colour here is blue. (Red is primary, and green secondary.)

In case you didn't guess, this means that you can use the tertiary colour to paint by holding CTRL while click-dragging the cursor in whatever tool.

Fixed lines, rectangles and ellipses
This feature is fairly simple, but there are still a lot of people who don't know about it. Holding down SHIFT while using the ellipse, rectangle or line tool will result in a "regular" shape. That is SHIFT+ellipse produces a perfect circle, rectangle yields a square and line a line at exactly 0 or 45 degrees from the horizontal or vertical (ie. all the cardinal points including NW, SW, NE, SE).

Clone and trail tools
This is a less useful feature that is still quite interesting and not very well-known. Select an area with the freehand or rectangular selection tools, then hold down CTRL or SHIFT and drag the area. CTRL clones the area - a duplicate image is created, much as if you pressed CTRL+C/CTRL+V. SHIFT creates a trail of the area - as if you had continually been pasting images. It certainly could save you a lot of time if you wanted to do this in the first place, and had to do it in Paint for some bizarre reason.

Smiley Snake looks over his Smiley Spawn.

10x zoom
This is a bit glitchy. If you click a certain row of pixels just below the 8x magnification level, you can get 10x magnification.

You've gotta click where the red line is.

Apparently this is a removed feature. It's not all that useful considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to get the right pixel row, especially since it makes almost no difference whatsoever.

Made in Microsoft Paint.

Anyway, I found these "easter eggs" fairly interesting. More easter eggs can be found at eeggs.com, including the famous Word '97 pinball game. Also, a substantial amount of this article was shamelessly taken from the Wikipedia, although I did rewrite it. Wikipedia also has an article about Paint .NET, which is apparently an open-source program made under Microsoft's guidance.

64k 'net sucks. :-(