There’s an application we use at work that I used to be an admin for at a previous job so I know all of the keyboard shortcuts, watching people use a mouse for navigation makes my skin crawl but I’ve been teaching some of my coworkers so it’s getting better.
CTRL>B the change you want to see in the world
Yeah something tells me this ain’t limited to computers, for you. God save whatever man, woman or child has to suffer your oversight.
But on the flip side. If you tell somebody something they don’t know like:
‘You can open links in new tabs by klicking on them with the mouse wheel.’
Or
‘You can reopen closed tabs by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T’
They look at you like you’ve just shown them the meaning of life. Bonus points if you see them using it later.
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You can what?!
Man, 2 weeks into an IT job, we’re doing a presentation and our VP of IT accidentally closed a tab. Felt like a wizard being the only person in the room, somehow, who knew that hotkey.
yep, not using scroll wheel but clicking on the up/down arrow in the side bar, or, especially in Windows, when the remote IT guy go through start menu and type “control panel” and go here and here and here and you are wondering how this guy knows so few?!?
Having done remote support in the past, there is often a delay and especially with scrolling it is difficult to control, so I always ended up doing the side bar thing as well.
Control panel is also a quirky one, because it is sorted alphabetically from left to right and then from top to bottom in the display language. So the control panel items are very often in a different place because Microsoft.
I did learn most of the control panel shortcuts because of that though, which still comes in handy sometimes. I even had a printed out cheat sheet for it.
I love Satisfactory but scrolling through a longer list of items can be a real pain. Scrolling with the mouse wheel feels incredibly slow and clicking the wheel once and then moving the the cursor down simply isn’t an option
So I’m often forced to resort to dragging the scroll bar manually, just like people in medieval times did
I don’t think the up/down arrows on the scroll-bars event exists anymore. They aren’t there in default windows 11 that’s for sure.
Edit: they do appear when you hoover your mouse over the scroll-bar or click on it.
when you hoover your mouse
pls, do not hoover your mouse
When they dont use keyboard shortcuts.
That depends on the person, and what their job is. The company IT guy should be able to do things faster than I can (or else I wouldn’t have called IT in the first place) and shortcuts are part of that. If it’s my retired construction worker of a father, there’s no way he was ever going to know the hundreds of windows keyboard shortcuts that the OS does a terrible job of letting anyone know that they actually exist.
now imagine being a heavy duty vim user and your coworker ssh’s into a machine, opens up vim, and eventually closes it by writing all their changes and then backgrounding the process, and then rebooting the machine
Closing vim is like landing a plane: anytime you can walk away unscathed it’s a success.
Select text -> Edit menu -> Copy, click elsewhere -> Edit menu -> Paste 🤮
Not knowing Ctrl+shift+esc opens the task manager is one thing, but copy and paste should be taught in school.
Ctrl+shift+esc was so useful back when I learned it. I still see people press ctrl+alt+del and click to open task manager. Or alternatively (but not as bad imo) right clicking on the start button and selecting to open task manager
right clicking on the start button and selecting to open task manager
TIL
You don’t even have to do it on the start button, any empty spot in the taskbar works
Win+X opens the same menu.
It doesn’t physically interrupt the system like ctrl alt delete does.
I still sometimes hit ctrl/alt/del to open the task manager if I’m not thinking.
Too many years of doing that when I was younger and it only brought up the task manager.
I still haven’t grown out of my ctrl + alt + del habit
Step 1: get a 60% keyboard
Step 2: don’t learn where the “delete” key is
Step 3: change the keycaps so you can’t even look at the keyboard to see where it is
Step 4: ???
Step 5: profit!
Wut. 😮
Thank you for this.
The best shortcut like that is win+X it opens a quick menu with stuff like Powershell, task manager, device manager, and a bunch of other admin stuff.
You can also right click the window icon to open the menu.
My fingers have that plus the correct directional keys memorized to put my computer to sleep.
I right click the start menu more than I open it normally.
I used to know this shortcut, but it was one of the many that I forgot after moving to linux.
Thanks for the refresher! I’ll probably get use of this on my work laptop
My lazy ass sometimes doesn’t feel like moving the left hand so I just use the mouse.
Valid
People like this have lost ctrl of their lives.
I was going to say why is that even there, but it reminded me of a very useful macOS tip:
You can access all the menu bar items that don’t have hot keys without leaving the keyboard.
Command+shift+question mark opens the help menu search bar and you can type in ANY menu bar item by name and press enter to do it. It will also show any keyboard shortcuts.
Ctrl+F2 selects the menu bar so you can use arrow keys, but that’s slower.
As an avid vim/terminal user, macOS accessibility shortcuts are friggen amazing.
Now I can’t stop picturing a nightmare scenario of having to watch someone do their copy/paste purely from the keyboard, but using the menus via that trick, rather than using the hotkeys. Thanks for that.
I wouldn’t have to paste via menu if “paste without formatting” didn’t require the fingers of a pianist.
Isn’t there a ctr+shift+v equivalent?
Yes, mostly it’s command instead of Ctrl
But some permutations of paste without formatting/paste values only/paste format only end up using 4 keys which is always awkward to do.
Paste Without Formatting exists on the right-click context menu almost everywhere. I don’t consider context menu usage to be annoying (to observe someone using) at all, personally.
But why use mouse when keyboard works?
Personally I find CTRL+SHIFT+V rather uncomfortable to press, not to mention it requires moving your whole hand down the keyboard, whereas CTRL+V doesn’t. A quick rightclick -> Paste Without Formatting is quick enough to do.
Ooooh thanks! I’ll use that a lot.
Oh that sounds really nice. I’m personally extremely annoyed that their shortcuts differ wildly from Windows and Linux shortcuts but at least this thing is some consolation.
After getting used to Mac (over 15 years now) I’ve grown to like the shortcuts, but it feels totally foreign when I use a Windows system. The reverse is also true.
i am okay with this during the few instances where they do things in a better way than i would have. like utilizing some extremely rare/custom keybinds for certain tasks in IDEs. those experiences are eye opening and humbling.
most of the other times though, yeah it’s pretty rough
This is how I learned about alt+drag and middle click in many common DEs.
This is how I learned about alt+drag and middle click in many common DEs.
Excellent! If you can incorporate them into your workflow, you may find your efficiency mildly enhanced, as I did.
What do those do?
In Windows, nothing. In Linux, if your DE supports it, you can hold down the Alt key and click anywhere to drag it, rather than using the title bar.
For middle click pasting: normally, to copy and paste text, you’d have to use Ctrl+c,Ctrl+v (or equivalent methods). Again, if your setup supports it, instead you can just highlight text, then middle click elsewhere to paste the highlighted text.
Oh I already knew about the alt one. I thought you were talking about IDEs lol. Was very sleep deprived when I read this the first time.
I like the middle click one. I knew you could use it to paste, but not copy.
When I made my comment, I was worried that “DE” would be interpreted as a typo … But not enough to expand it.
I’m pretty savvy but I have learned a few tricks from others. Although some people make me grind my teeth down to nubs
YAYYYY
I’M GONNA USE YOUR COMPUTER TO STEAL YOUR IDENTITY
Try sitting as a passenger while your friend takes your car for a spin.
Um have you ever tried to debug something over a zoom call on a *nix shell cli? This person’s nightmare is my Tuesday morning before I get coffee.
Watching anyone else’s terminal flow is my personal hell.
But then when you do find someone else who gets it and you start swapping runcoms it’s like the most beautiful thing.
It’s like when I log in to a vnc session and see a bunch of nano commands in the history, I just know my day is gonna be fucked.
there is a reason i use i3wm on linux.
You cannot use my computer, it is impossible.
I could unless your i3 config is atypical
this person dotfiles.
good news for you, i use mostly stock binds for navigation, the defaults are always the best, and a few extraneous ones for launching applications and configuration and such.
ah, the feels of keyboard(mostly)only navigation.
bonus points to get someone to quit vim.
it’s so nice, the best invention ever. The worst as floating WMs. Terrible idea.
Anyway i quit vim, to use nvim instead :)
Do you game? If so, how is it with tiling?
yeah, play minecraft and factorio mostly, it’s great. Opening a game in bordered with another window is a little goofy sometimes, but you can set that workspace to be stacking/tabbed instead of splitting, and that solves that problem, you can also just make it open in fullscreen if you want though. One of the really nice things is since it’s a WM dealing with any sort of fullscreen operations are going to be pretty substantially simplified.
I have had a few weird input issues but that might be my config, i haven’t gone through it incredibly tediously. I can highly recommend at least trying a WM if you haven’t before, i3wm is quite nice as it’s extremely minimal but mostly configured out of the box, you’ll need ot do some minor config but other than that it’s usable once installed.
the factory must grow
THE FACTORY MUST GROW
I tried Manjaro with sway, but had a few deal breaker issue, such as sound not working at all.
I just installed i3 on my personal pc and it works straight out of the box, which is a better experience already than Sway.
So I will see how I like it. I bought a 48" monitor specifically to act as a bezel-less dual/quad monitor, so a WM felt like it was a no brainer.
WMs tend to be like that sometimes, they usually require some form of configuration, like sound, and more general system management, theming, etc. But if you’re familiar with all of that, it’s trivial enough to setup and get working.
Ironically i3wm is intended for multi monitor operation, i’m unsure if you can do virtual monitors, though idk if software limits that at all, you might be able to do that natively lol. I’ve been using i3 with 3 monitors for a while, it’s super nice. Basically exactly what i wanted for my setup.
if you like i3 you should check out qtile. it’s written in python and has good documentation.
I am just getting started with i3. I think the issue was more with Manjaro Sway.
It’s been a few days now without any issues on Linux Mint. I haven’t done anything complicated yet, but it feels natural to open and move windows around, which is a great start.
And the sound works too. So that’s good.
Part of the reason I installed Arch (BTW) is to see the looks of confusion and concern on my family’s faces as I’m computationizing
I have never installed pure arch. I like endeavor OS.
it’s definitely a benefit. It’s always fun showing people how nicely you can navigate and how cleanly you can configure things.
Ugh it’s the worst. Every time I remotely connect with Social Security support, there’s always such a delay while they click around. Thankfully they help me understand how many viruses I have by running some weird command called Net Stat or something idk. I see the screen flash and it’s scary. They’re even so helpful that they even help me login to my bank and transfer funds to get rid of the net viruses! I only wish they would scroll the mouse instead of clicking on the arrow bars. They’re helpful, but man do I hate when they yell and curse at me when I don’t have money and can’t pay them until next week. But I guess it’s worth the small computer struggles, but boy does it bother me when they don’t scroll the mouse wheel!
I’ve dealt with that and found a solution. What’s your SSN?
Oh fantastic! I didn’t expect to find you guys on the mouse Reddit version, whatever it is I’m using here to share my success story!
I’m scared someone will attack me, so I can tweet it instead with that cool encryption thing that Elon talked about. I’ll try it now.
@tweet send Okay we’re safe here, no one can see it except you and me. Thanks for the help, I don’t know if the hackers can see my stuff. But if I cover my webcam while I type this I think we’re good. My social security number is 155-21-3249. I think I already sent the last payment, so if I need to get you a new Google robot gift card or whatever it’s called, I can try to go to target. I get paid Friday, is that okay?
Seeing people with respectable typing speed using just their two index fingers. What a waste. They could have been great.
Ah yes, my dad mastered the 2-finger-search-system
Cue Sean Connery in Finding Forester typing a full page with two index fingers like a boss.
Even if they were half as fast, it’s so much more satisfying when you use all your fingers.
I remember day I started actually using my right pinky finger to press the semicolon. That’s when I became a real man.
That reminds me of when I learned to touch type 3 years ago, I went from 30wpm hunt and peck to 15wpm touch type
Now I’m at ~80wpm and my small brain coming up with words is the limiting factor hahaHah, sometimes I forget how to spell a word but my fingers still remember it
That’d be me! Over 90 wpm with mostly my index fingers. I do use other fingers for some keys (I always hit space with my thumb and backspace with my ring finger), but it’s mostly index fingers.
Same. I imagine, for me at least, it’s due to having deal with unendingly different keyboard models and not being in front of a terminal all day.
I can however type relatively quickly with either my left or right hand and with the keyboard facing me or sideways. It’s a skill that’s really useful when helping someone out with an issue they’re facing. (I prefer being at their side over remote, as I can gauge what they do and don’t understand better)
Your words do not hurt me, I’m already used to being a diappointment.
People that learned on manual typewriters will do this.
I (my parents) had a computer when I was 5 and didn’t learn to type properly until I took a typing class on manual typewriters in middle school because computer games don’t teach you to type and we didn’t have the internet
The fingers aren’t the bottleneck, it’s the brain. I type just as fast with two fingers as with ten.
Oh my goodness… my job requires me to work with a team on some fairly industry specialized software (steaming and broadcast television); the way my coworkers have their shit set up is so weird. It’s like we are all speaking the same language, but with wildly different dialects.
In my job as a Product Manager, I make specialized software for internal users in my company. Watching people use it can be so painful.
An example: Look at dashboard view > memorize client name > go to client view > type in client name to search > click to view the client
When they could have just clicked to view the client from the dashboard.
After I finish cringing, I just take it as learnings for how to build/design better in the future.
Same, but CADD packages. Every UI is different for each app. Users each have unique configurations of buttons, ribbons, and task windows. Some apps even use completely different terms for identical concepts. Long ago I stopped remembering button and tool placement in autoCAD and just memorized commands because the GUI would completely change with every update and sometimes after a crash.
Go on a older person’s phone. Whenever I have to do anything on my mom’s phone, it gives me a headache. Everything is too bright and big and unorganized and has so man notifications! And her phone is much newer than mine and it’s still hard for me.
My mom refuses to turn off notifications from apps so there are constantly 30-40 notifications. Making it completely unusable.
I just don’t get it, you can control how your phone works but people act like they can’t do a thing
“no don’t change anything, you’ll break it! i like it how it is”
My mom just got a smart phone for the first time this year, but thankfully she has no interest in using it as anything but a phone
