However, I remember trying to map capslock to control on windows a few years back. It involved becoming an administrator and entering an opaque hexadecimal key into the registry.
Simply popping off the key is probably easier.
Oh, on linux it boils down to "setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps", which doesn't require root...
The biggest problem with software (on OS side) is than you can't use your custom layout in BIOS, LiveCDs or when you need to type password if your hardware is encrypted.
Another problem is games. I use dvorak and all games use qwerty bindings so you need either to remap keys for each game or start game with QWERTY layout. If you forgot to start it with qwerty you need to restart the game, which is was really frustrating for me. It's even more problematical with online games like League of legends and etc.
I see no problem for this feature to be present on even cheapest keyboards. I picked ergodox just for an examle.
In the context of the article we're talking about a highly specialized office environment, where bios/live boot environments etc. do not happen often. There, a software solution is useful and cheap.
In the more general case, and for those people that do not mind carrying their own keyboard everywhere, you are right. Especially since a keyboard that expensive probably lasts for a long enough time...
In at least one finance company I know of, alternative keyboards are not permitted without getting security's permission. They might not do a very thorough examination, but I can imagine they might disallow a programmable keyboard on the basis of it being too complex to analyze the risks.
the problem cited in the article is performance. a "help" dialog shouldn't take several seconds to open, it shouldn't take foreground control, and you shouldn't have to wait for it to finish opening in order to close it. and you definitely shouldn't have to move your hand to the mouse to close something that was opened by an accidental keystroke.
if the view doesn't get obstructed and you could simply tap F1 a second time (or Esc) and instantly be back to what you were doing, i think the UX problem would be solved.
in firefox, i sometimes hit F12 on accident -- but i can just tap it again to close the dev tools, even if it hasn't finished loading. that's decent UX.
No.. The problem cited in the article is: a common operation that is invoked hundreds of times a day is bound to F2. An uncommon operation that breaks the user's flow is bound to F1. Users keep hitting F1 by accident.
The only proper and decent UX in this case is to remove the source of the error. You do that by removing the binding of F1
this is the problem. and it breaks the user's flow because it obscures the work area and can't be instantly dismissed.
there's nothing wrong with putting relatively uncommon actions next to common actions on the keyboard as long as the actions don't break the user's flow.
SharpKeys [1] is the tool I've kept in my toolbelt to do this for several years now. (Though I swap capslock for an extra backspace or escape depending on mood and amount of Vim in my life at the time.)
for me it's ⌘+W vs ⌘+Q in Firefox: the first closes the current tab, the second the whole browser which takes some time to restart. Solved it now with an add-on
Not too different from me accidentally triggering so many undesired things with the MacBook Pro TouchBar. I previously had no idea how many interfaces respond to the Esc key, now I do.
There are dozens of us. It's massively disrupting to the state of flow to miss a key by one, and suddenly another window pops up, but there's no text inside. It takes several seconds for the window to compose itself, and several more to close.
I do keep the F1 key somewhere safe, to put back onto the keyboard, for the next keyboard user.
I came here to mention Scroll Lock which normally doesn't do much in Windows applications but I was utterly confused the other day when my Excel started behaving weirdly !
Excel users don't think that way, I guess. Remapping keys requires a registry update on Windows, which many of my windows-at-work friends don't get access to. Even if they did, they might not trust themselves to make registry updates. Popping the key off is easy, secure, and effective.
tl;dr F1 is generally help . Excel's help is apparently slow to load and close. Hence, the interviewees removed the key to avoid pressing it, when they meant to press F2.
It's disappointing but unsurprising they didn't just have windows (autohotkey?) map it to F2.
Article says its a banking environment, nobody outside of desktop support will have admin access to their PC/Laptop.
That includes developers/application support/server admins/DBAs etc.
If you want an application installed that's not on an approved list request will likely go to IT security for review(Don't hold your breath). portableapps.com made life somewhat bearable.
PS No Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive, No personal webmail and a heavily restricted proxy for all browsing.
> Article says its a banking environment, nobody outside of desktop support will have admin access to their PC/Laptop
But then it should be even simpler: Have the desktop support team (or whoever manages all those PC/Laptops) solve it centrally, once and for all, for every computer in the company.
Why would not they remap F1 to something else, say another F2 if they so like it? The functionality has been at both Linux and Windows for a very long time.
Because popping the key is by far the simplest solution, especially if you won't miss it in any of your usual workflows.
AFAIK remapping it will need Autohotkey or similar, and banks & funds aren't the environment the more welcoming to arbitrary binaries, even if free software.
They are users, users too often think in terms of optimizing what they do, not the tools they use, or learning to optimize things they think are underlying and fixed.
AFAIK, Windows has never had a built-in way to remap keys. Sure, you can download third-party tools to do it, but that's often a dicey move in a corporate environment where you aren't allowed to install third-party software.
I'm really surprised more keyboards can't do this kind of simple remapping themselves. I used to remap the keys on virtually every machine I worked on, but these days I just bring in my CODE keyboard which does some simple remapping itself (e.g., caps lock -> ctrl).
In addition to what other people mention, it's generally a bad idea to take a sloppy input and try to autocorrect it, because it encourage bad habits that will really surprise you the next time the autocorrect doesn't work as you expect. This ranges from autocorrecting spelling, to keypresses, to UNIX commands, to all sorts of things. It's better to block or highlight (if relevant) the bad input than to try to correct it automatically. For one thing, if you encourage sloppy input, the brain automatically adjusts and will become even more sloppy; while this isn't necessarily a never-ending spiral it is still quite likely to lead somewhere worse than blocking bad input entirely.
(Incidentally, if you want to fiddle with your keyboard but you don't want to go whole-hog with switching to an entirely different layout, you can use this principle to switch around two keys really quickly. If you want to try your Caps Lock as, say, CTRL, that's fine, but be sure to unmap the CTRL key itself. If you don't, it'll just be frustrating as you try to force yourself to remember, and realize three weeks later that Caps Lock is still mapped to CTRL but you haven't used it at all. If you do unmap the old key entirely, you'll find you've adjusted entirely in as little as 5 minutes, and it's only another 5 minutes to go back, if that's what you decide. You can iterate on these things much more easily than you might think.)
I would guess that PCs in banks are quite locked down, maybe even making it impossible to remap keys.
But everyone can pop some keys from his/her keyboard.
Plus it's a much easier (and fun) office mod than messing around in the settings of all your applications ;)
Correct – even for developers in DMZ networks have a hard time getting to install things they need to work. Many organizations have convoluted processes for requesting admin access to your machine. Even if you do get access it doesn't mean you necessarily can even download things, most have firewalls that block binaries from anything but "trusted" sources (basically white listed domains, so yeah – "trust".) In a few cases, monitoring on machines have raised red flags and I've had to explain after the fact why I've installed or run a particular piece of software, and in some cases got a proverbial wrist slap and things/access reset.
It's all for good reasons I'm sure, but some processes and rules are so opaque and convoluted and arbitrary, plucking keys off a keyboard is much easier.
Source: I've worked as a developer in mostly top tier banks since 2011.
Huh! I've been considering remapping F1 in vim for a while, I might actually go ahead and use it for something quite common (I've already taken up F2-12 for other handy tasks).
Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Same goes for answers.microsoft.com, whenever i see that link on top og Google results I'm pretty sure I'll just waste 10 minutes of my life and then search for the same thing on Stackexchange and pray to god someone has answered there in the succinct SO way. God knows how much resources and man hours Microsoft puts into making these things.
I remember back in the days of 98 when in my experience, hitting F1 would trigger the help which would never load rapidly or successfully. My standard operating procedure was to do a hard shutdown. It was so frustrating.
I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.
And for this very reason (throttled CPU lock over accidental bullshit > BSOD > necessitating cutting all electrical power to all circuits) was THE reason I despised the idea of proprietary hard-soldered batteries in laptops and mobile devices, and shaped my buying habits for years.
I simply could not trust these shit options, regarding unhackable-useless-cruft-removal-customizations (aka: pre-live-cd-linux era) not conflicting with the need to cut power to the main board and CPU, to force a cold boot on a moment's notice.
Now, I still despise the idea of non-removable battery power, and avoid it vehemently, but for different reasons. Basically fuck any Android device that has no removable battery, no well-understood rooting procedures, and locked falsh firmware. Fuck Android's slow-loading, identity-authentication-prompting-geographic-location-demanding shitware, and all-encompassing, non-uninstallable-OEM-but-still-mostly-Google/Facebook/Twitter-garbage.
Fuck Apple products that refuse to power on even when plugged into power, and fully capable of displaying a fancy, animated empty battery graphic. Fuck that shit right in the god damned face.
I plug you into the wall, and you shall power on at my whim. I want you off, I pop the battery and pull the plug whenever I want, or I THROW IT ON THE GROUND.
Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.
I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0.
On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.
Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do.
Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing.
With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.
Don't know if you noticed, but a few years ago a ton on the on-box help content in Windows got replaced with fwlinks. I'm pretty sure it was because they realized they were spending a ton of money on shipping and localizing content that people would just ignore in favor of search results. Open notepad and look at Help->View Help for an example.
On a side note, this is extremely uncool for people working on non-internet connected machines. It is doubly annoying when you're using the web interface to interact with a device and click help and it 503s because they didn't bother to ship the manual on the device.
Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.
AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.
I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..
That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.
I've never been helped by nor successfully troubleshot anything with either of those. And I'm baffled why a glorified text document which rarely contains any useful information grinds my beefy gaming computer to a halt.
> It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things.
Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given.
Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.
The internet has been a thing for quite some time now, like at least 4 os releases? Microsoft could have found the time to redo the help system to suck less.
I really don't understand how a company as big as Microsoft allows something like answers.microsoft.com to exist.
Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice.
The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things.
I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.
I wish I could remove "F1" from Chrome: I'm in the middle of a lot of tabs, reading them after each other and accidentially pressing F1 instead of ESC and a new useless help tab obens on the far right.
Luckily if I close it immediately without navigating, Chrome is clever enough to return me to the last tab
In my view, there are many insights like this to be had by physically studying product users a bit more. The startup community has built a strong habit of studying users before a new solution is adopted, but not as much after.
'Desire lines' in parks are one example. Desire lines are the paths in the grass that get worn down because people use them even though the designer didn't plan for it.
Damn it, i have had a prominent FOSS DE guy basically claim that users are idiots after studying the results of a usability test of their DE.
For me, in the trenches, it is more that users find their own ways of doing things. And if it works for them it works for them, and we have no business correcting them.
Agreed. When I worked at a newspaper, my most valuable contributions by far were ones made after spending a day with a reporter, ad designer, etc. and talking with them about their daily routine.
Keep in mind there's evolutionary momentum at work here, too. The standard uses of F1 and F2 especially that are at play in the discussion here date back to some of the earliest PC tools. Volkswriter supposedly used F1 for help as far back as 1982, and it was standardized in the 1987 IBM Common User Access guidelines (which also standardized things like F5 for Refresh before web browsers burnt that shortcut in all our brains): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
So it is very hard to trade-off the momentum of a three decades old standard just to delight particular subsets of power users.
Not to mention the other side of it: why was help so slow and aggravating? Were there ways to make it non-modal and faster. Unsurprisingly, that's been the focus where Office has tried to make an impact, trying to speed up Help and make it less obnoxious over the years, rather than change up a three decade old keyboard shortcut.
They could have acknowledged that F1 is "help" and really slow / annoying, so putting a much useful function onto F2 was probably a bad idea. They could have put what F2 did onto a different shortcut.
For instance, they could make F2 something that was infrequently useful and unintrusive, then made F3 do what F2 did. So if you mispress, you don't do the even worse F1 thing.
Again, per the link prior: this standard predates even Office itself. They could have not followed the standard, but then they would have angered users for not following standards used elsewhere in PC applications at the time.
F2 has long been "Rename Object" and F3 has long been "Find" (though Excel in this case doesn't use it for that, but that's another matter). Did IBM do enough user studies at the time? I'm not sure IBM could have found a user study to predict the order of those choices being irritating to Excel users two and half decades later.
Even then, too, the IBM CUA I pointed to was partly synthetic, pulling in commonalities from apps at the time of its writing. Given F2 is nearly universal as "Rename Object" [1], I've got a feeling it predates the IBM CUA by quite a bit in some heavily used applications, but I'm not a historian.
Office never existed in a vacuum, and the function keys have had common meanings for decades. Microsoft used a mix of the IBM CUA guidelines and presumably what they were seeing from the competition (Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc especially for Excel early in its history). If they put the useful function of F2 somewhere else, they would have broken the muscle memory of so many other PC users, even early in Excel's history. If they moved it today there might be riots, some rioting even by the same people removing F1 keys from keyboards.
One thing to keep in mind is that some of these shortcut keys predated the modern AT-style keyboard with the function keys across the top. They were introduced way back in the day of the original PC keyboard with function keys in two columns at the left. F1 and F2 were side by side at the top of these columns, and they were very easy to distinguish from each other and hit reliably. F2 was just about the easiest function key for a touch typist to hit.
When my dad was doing some UI work back in like the late 70s, maybe early 80s, for call-center workers no one knew how to do UI yet. But he quickly realised that if you put people in a room and asked them for their feedback after using it for 20 minutes, what they told you would become useless when you actually deployed the software. So he pushed to have the software implement recording features like how long a person is on at which page and which page they went to next. I'm surprised more people don't do that even today when it shouldn't be that much of a technical challenge. Just "here's a trial copy of the software: use it for two weeks and come back to us with your data."
Well, I think it matters if you have the knowledge and consent of the participants, whether the data will be used to produce a proprietary profile on the person, whether that data is sold, and if participants are compensated for participating in a market research program.
It suffices to use KeyTweak for Windows, not physically modify the keyboard. For example, I used it to disable the Back/Forward buttons on my ThinkPad.
When I was younger and played games, popping out the windows key was typical. At best triggering windows menu meant lost round, but more typically a crashed game or even crashed Windows.
Even today I'm wary of task switching from a game, as it still doesn't seem to be entirely robust
I haven't hosed a windows session yet, and maybe just one game was crashy ever, while task switching for the last two decades. I ran Windows Server though typically.
I remember this not-so-fondly. This wouldn't be a problem for a game that is composited alongside the desktop in a "Windowed" mode, but for a full-screen application it is an "exclusive" application. The Source engine handles this context switch absolutely terribly. Task-switching out of Team Fortress 2 is a stuttery mess, where for around ten seconds it'll just loop the tiny audio buffer it last filled on top of a black screen before anything is usable again.
Back in my Engineer days, where I'd spend much of my time writing technical reports, I'd always remove the Insert key from my keyboard.
It's sitting there in that block of six keys that you use all the time when editing text (home, end, page up/down, delete), and it's a little timebomb. You would invariably hit it by accident at some point and change your editor into "overwrite all my stuff" mode.
It would usually take a minute or two of ruining your document before you realized what was happening and spent the next several minutes repairing the damage.
I would go years at a time without ever hitting that key on purpose, so I just kept it in a drawer, in case it ever needed using.
Now, as a developer, there's an Insert in tons of useful keyboard combos, so it needs to stay there. And laptops have ruined that old useful six-key block so it's a lot rarer to hit it by accident.
But it had no business being there. Fifteen years later, I'm still not a friend of that key.
I vaguely recall using it a few times back in the day to edit things like fixed-format columnar text files. Now that sort of thing is easier with years worth of accumulated knowledge of tools, but I wasn't born with that knowledge.
Heh, as you can see from the other comments, I don't know all the vi commands either. Just a few essentials. I'd assumed from the comment you were a vi person and probably knew more vi than me.
I don't use vi for coding, just quick file edits on the console. I was xemacs for a very long time in college and thereafter - to the point of writing elisp to manipulate xml files, but eventually my Java day job pushed me towards a full IDE. Java is kinda unbearable without it.
I still occasionally turn to emacs for a few things I can't get elsewhere (editing binaries, large files, and doing search and replace in a narrowed buffer), but it's no longer my primary editor or mail reader. I may pick it up again for clojure coding, though.
Yeah, I'm a full IDE guy too but if I'm editing something that where that wouldn't make sense it's back to emacs with me. IntelliJ also supports emacs bindings. :)
‘cw’ isn't overwrite, ‘cw’ is change word. ‘R’ is overwrite. I use ‘r’ sometimes, mostly for things like ‘yypfxry’, but I can't remember the last time I used ‘R’.
>laptops have ruined that old useful six-key block
For what it's worth, my Thinkpad definitely isn't ruined--it has a five key block containing the other keys you mentioned. Insert is over to the right in a four-key row (along with PrtSc, ScrLk, and Pause) that's above F9-F12
Agreed — overwrite mode is something I basically never want and am always unhappily surprised to find it's switched on.
That's one of the things I like about using C-a, C-e, M-v & C-v, C-d instead of home, end, pgup, pgdn & Del — much less likely to accidentally hit the wrong key. And my hands don't have to fly so far from my keyboard!
Overwrite mode is basically a relic from the old fixed-width record days. We just need to think up a better use for the Insert key so people don't fall back on making it the overwrite toggle.
Maybe in a word processor it could bring up the "put a picture/graph/whatever" right here in this document?
Before Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, the usual method was Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins (and Shift+Del for cut), so this key did have a lot of use back in the day. These key combinations still work in most Windows software.
In DOS, these combos were used by Borland's Turbo Vision GUI toolkit (and they didn't offer Ctrl+C/V/X as alternatives). So everything written using that - and there was quite a bit, especially once you count LOB apps - had those shortcuts. In particular, all of Borland's own IDEs did, so those of us who learned to code C or Pascal on DOS in that era still got those shortcuts memorized.
Business Insider has annoying anti-adblocker popups. Is there some way to block websites that do this?
I tried living without adblocker for a while, but I started getting some very not safe for work ads from dhgate all over the place. Just because I buy electronics doesn't mean I want ads for lingerie...
Agreed. I actually got so irritated with this site, that I have added the simple blocker add in to chrome to block this site. I refuse to support them anymore. I dont care if they have something I want to read, Im not visiting that site ever again...
I have a little stylesheet installed on my browser that I use for fixing random annoyances on various websites, and my favorite feature in it is adding "text-decoration: line-through" to links that point to certain sites such as Business Insider. That way, I still have the option to visit the site, but I get a strong visual indicator to avoid it.
> Business Insider has annoying anti-adblocker popups. Is there some way to block websites that do this?
With NoScript blocking their javascript from even running, there's no annoying anti-adblocker popup. The article opened just fine and was fully readable.
F2 is also rename on a host of Windows applications, including Windows Explorer.
I've popped it off more than once but couldn't get used to not hitting F3 instead of F2.
What I ended up doing was to rename Windows Help (winhlp32.exe at the time) to something else then copy and rename cmd.exe (or command.com, depending on how far back) to "winhlp32.exe". Now when I pressed F1 it would open a command window, much more useful and less intrusive if hit accidentally.
I work in the field - years ago I had someone create a small program called "TurnOffF1" that runs silently in the background. It captures any F1 keypush in Excel only & blocks the Help popup.
OMG! This is genius!, how have i never thought of this before!
I bet the people removing caps lock, scroll lock, insert etc are doing it because of the "cleaning ladies"! Not because they accidentally hit the keys.
But because in most offices, keyboards are swiped clean daily by cleaning crews and when you arrive each morning you find an assortment of those keys toggled on or off.
(I have even locked my Windows account on occasion due to not noticing a combination of Caps Lock / Num Lock toggled on/off in the morning)
I lock my keyboard away when I leave... I'll sleep better knowing nobody made it off with my 200$ mechanical clacker. As a side bonus I don't get mystery things locked when I arrive the next morning.
I use a Model M and remap capslock to super/windows button. I'm so used to it I remap it on laptops as well. Have never come across an instance to actually use all caps.
I use my pinky to press shift and tab already. I press ctrl with the side of my hand. This way I can press both ctrl and shift at the same time, which is important for RTS and FPS games. Maybe I should map it to backspace like was suggested by WorldMaker.
Huh, must be keyboard size/shape differences but palm-pressing "fn" on my keyboard (where "ctrl" would be on a normal keyboard) while hitting "shift" with my pinkie is impossible without mashing other keys around them, and is really uncomfortable. End up pressing "shift" with the side of my first knuckle, that finger's so contorted. I use pinkie + ring when I hit two modifiers on that side, though that does mean I take a finger off "WASD", for gaming purposes.
It'd be easier to train myself to hit shift+caps (as a ctrl) with just my pinkie than to do the palm + pinkie method, I think. Again, probably a hardware difference.
I remap capslock to backspace normally. You'd be surprised how useful a second, closer backspace can be. If I'm using a lot of Vim remapping capslock to Escape can be more useful. A lot of people like capslock remapped to control.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadHowever, I remember trying to map capslock to control on windows a few years back. It involved becoming an administrator and entering an opaque hexadecimal key into the registry.
Simply popping off the key is probably easier.
Oh, on linux it boils down to "setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps", which doesn't require root...
https://superuser.com/questions/413384/how-to-remap-control-...
One of them Ergodox EZ ~$350 https://ergodox-ez.com/
However, 350$ seems like a lot of money for a problem that should really be solvable at no cost in software...
Another problem is games. I use dvorak and all games use qwerty bindings so you need either to remap keys for each game or start game with QWERTY layout. If you forgot to start it with qwerty you need to restart the game, which is was really frustrating for me. It's even more problematical with online games like League of legends and etc.
I see no problem for this feature to be present on even cheapest keyboards. I picked ergodox just for an examle.
In the context of the article we're talking about a highly specialized office environment, where bios/live boot environments etc. do not happen often. There, a software solution is useful and cheap.
In the more general case, and for those people that do not mind carrying their own keyboard everywhere, you are right. Especially since a keyboard that expensive probably lasts for a long enough time...
And this software is called "Excel". This should really be solved in software called "Excel". As in: remove functionality from F1
if the view doesn't get obstructed and you could simply tap F1 a second time (or Esc) and instantly be back to what you were doing, i think the UX problem would be solved.
in firefox, i sometimes hit F12 on accident -- but i can just tap it again to close the dev tools, even if it hasn't finished loading. that's decent UX.
The only proper and decent UX in this case is to remove the source of the error. You do that by removing the binding of F1
this is the problem. and it breaks the user's flow because it obscures the work area and can't be instantly dismissed.
there's nothing wrong with putting relatively uncommon actions next to common actions on the keyboard as long as the actions don't break the user's flow.
This. Yet you propose to keep the action that breaks the user flow even if it's often triggered by mistake ;)
I propose to remove the action that breaks the user flow.
https://superuser.com/questions/291018/consume-keystroke-in-...
[1] https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys
Editing a Web form and suddenly having the entire tab disappear is less than gruntling.
I do keep the F1 key somewhere safe, to put back onto the keyboard, for the next keyboard user.
It's disappointing but unsurprising they didn't just have windows (autohotkey?) map it to F2.
PS No Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive, No personal webmail and a heavily restricted proxy for all browsing.
But then it should be even simpler: Have the desktop support team (or whoever manages all those PC/Laptops) solve it centrally, once and for all, for every computer in the company.
AFAIK remapping it will need Autohotkey or similar, and banks & funds aren't the environment the more welcoming to arbitrary binaries, even if free software.
I'm really surprised more keyboards can't do this kind of simple remapping themselves. I used to remap the keys on virtually every machine I worked on, but these days I just bring in my CODE keyboard which does some simple remapping itself (e.g., caps lock -> ctrl).
(Incidentally, if you want to fiddle with your keyboard but you don't want to go whole-hog with switching to an entirely different layout, you can use this principle to switch around two keys really quickly. If you want to try your Caps Lock as, say, CTRL, that's fine, but be sure to unmap the CTRL key itself. If you don't, it'll just be frustrating as you try to force yourself to remember, and realize three weeks later that Caps Lock is still mapped to CTRL but you haven't used it at all. If you do unmap the old key entirely, you'll find you've adjusted entirely in as little as 5 minutes, and it's only another 5 minutes to go back, if that's what you decide. You can iterate on these things much more easily than you might think.)
But everyone can pop some keys from his/her keyboard. Plus it's a much easier (and fun) office mod than messing around in the settings of all your applications ;)
It's all for good reasons I'm sure, but some processes and rules are so opaque and convoluted and arbitrary, plucking keys off a keyboard is much easier.
Source: I've worked as a developer in mostly top tier banks since 2011.
I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.
I simply could not trust these shit options, regarding unhackable-useless-cruft-removal-customizations (aka: pre-live-cd-linux era) not conflicting with the need to cut power to the main board and CPU, to force a cold boot on a moment's notice.
Now, I still despise the idea of non-removable battery power, and avoid it vehemently, but for different reasons. Basically fuck any Android device that has no removable battery, no well-understood rooting procedures, and locked falsh firmware. Fuck Android's slow-loading, identity-authentication-prompting-geographic-location-demanding shitware, and all-encompassing, non-uninstallable-OEM-but-still-mostly-Google/Facebook/Twitter-garbage.
Fuck Apple products that refuse to power on even when plugged into power, and fully capable of displaying a fancy, animated empty battery graphic. Fuck that shit right in the god damned face.
I plug you into the wall, and you shall power on at my whim. I want you off, I pop the battery and pull the plug whenever I want, or I THROW IT ON THE GROUND.
I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0.
On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.
Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing.
With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.
Then it became uselessly slow.
Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.
Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.
Windows, Office, Visual C++ help are all God-awful now. As a few have said, much better just to Google search and lunge for Stack Overflow.
Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given.
Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.
Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice.
The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things.
I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.
Luckily if I close it immediately without navigating, Chrome is clever enough to return me to the last tab
https://gist.github.com/blockoperation/5ec91d666e670e39584d2...
The insights designers get from just watching someone use a product are always delightful. The idea is basically ethnography for design. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyc...)
'Desire lines' in parks are one example. Desire lines are the paths in the grass that get worn down because people use them even though the designer didn't plan for it.
Damn it, i have had a prominent FOSS DE guy basically claim that users are idiots after studying the results of a usability test of their DE.
For me, in the trenches, it is more that users find their own ways of doing things. And if it works for them it works for them, and we have no business correcting them.
So it is very hard to trade-off the momentum of a three decades old standard just to delight particular subsets of power users.
Not to mention the other side of it: why was help so slow and aggravating? Were there ways to make it non-modal and faster. Unsurprisingly, that's been the focus where Office has tried to make an impact, trying to speed up Help and make it less obnoxious over the years, rather than change up a three decade old keyboard shortcut.
For instance, they could make F2 something that was infrequently useful and unintrusive, then made F3 do what F2 did. So if you mispress, you don't do the even worse F1 thing.
F2 has long been "Rename Object" and F3 has long been "Find" (though Excel in this case doesn't use it for that, but that's another matter). Did IBM do enough user studies at the time? I'm not sure IBM could have found a user study to predict the order of those choices being irritating to Excel users two and half decades later.
Even then, too, the IBM CUA I pointed to was partly synthetic, pulling in commonalities from apps at the time of its writing. Given F2 is nearly universal as "Rename Object" [1], I've got a feeling it predates the IBM CUA by quite a bit in some heavily used applications, but I'm not a historian.
Office never existed in a vacuum, and the function keys have had common meanings for decades. Microsoft used a mix of the IBM CUA guidelines and presumably what they were seeing from the competition (Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc especially for Excel early in its history). If they put the useful function of F2 somewhere else, they would have broken the muscle memory of so many other PC users, even early in Excel's history. If they moved it today there might be riots, some rioting even by the same people removing F1 keys from keyboards.
[1] You can see it on this chart and compare it with most of its neighbors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts
http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/83key.jpg
http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibm_pc.shtml
These days, we call this "telemetry".
>I'm surprised more people don't do that even today...
Because telemetry is seen as evil. Remember how WMS is praised for collecting this data in Windows 10 to make a better product? Yup, me neither.
The irony is, of course, that every web-based product has these stats built-in. Facebook is known to gather this exact data, for example.
As a side note, it always gets me when people whose PC usage is 99% on the web complain about "telemetry".
Even today I'm wary of task switching from a game, as it still doesn't seem to be entirely robust
(slightly larger photo of the golden keyboard: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CULeDw8XIAAo0-U.png )
It's sitting there in that block of six keys that you use all the time when editing text (home, end, page up/down, delete), and it's a little timebomb. You would invariably hit it by accident at some point and change your editor into "overwrite all my stuff" mode.
It would usually take a minute or two of ruining your document before you realized what was happening and spent the next several minutes repairing the damage.
I would go years at a time without ever hitting that key on purpose, so I just kept it in a drawer, in case it ever needed using.
Now, as a developer, there's an Insert in tons of useful keyboard combos, so it needs to stay there. And laptops have ruined that old useful six-key block so it's a lot rarer to hit it by accident.
But it had no business being there. Fifteen years later, I'm still not a friend of that key.
I don't use vi for coding, just quick file edits on the console. I was xemacs for a very long time in college and thereafter - to the point of writing elisp to manipulate xml files, but eventually my Java day job pushed me towards a full IDE. Java is kinda unbearable without it.
I still occasionally turn to emacs for a few things I can't get elsewhere (editing binaries, large files, and doing search and replace in a narrowed buffer), but it's no longer my primary editor or mail reader. I may pick it up again for clojure coding, though.
For what it's worth, my Thinkpad definitely isn't ruined--it has a five key block containing the other keys you mentioned. Insert is over to the right in a four-key row (along with PrtSc, ScrLk, and Pause) that's above F9-F12
That's one of the things I like about using C-a, C-e, M-v & C-v, C-d instead of home, end, pgup, pgdn & Del — much less likely to accidentally hit the wrong key. And my hands don't have to fly so far from my keyboard!
Maybe in a word processor it could bring up the "put a picture/graph/whatever" right here in this document?
It took about 3 years before anyone complained, and I think there is still just the one complaint.
I tried living without adblocker for a while, but I started getting some very not safe for work ads from dhgate all over the place. Just because I buy electronics doesn't mean I want ads for lingerie...
My stylesheet is here; you can install it with the Stylish browser extension: https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/3338da5c38348c2a6e72
With NoScript blocking their javascript from even running, there's no annoying anti-adblocker popup. The article opened just fine and was fully readable.
I've popped it off more than once but couldn't get used to not hitting F3 instead of F2.
What I ended up doing was to rename Windows Help (winhlp32.exe at the time) to something else then copy and rename cmd.exe (or command.com, depending on how far back) to "winhlp32.exe". Now when I pressed F1 it would open a command window, much more useful and less intrusive if hit accidentally.
Wish I had the source code for the program.
I bet the people removing caps lock, scroll lock, insert etc are doing it because of the "cleaning ladies"! Not because they accidentally hit the keys.
But because in most offices, keyboards are swiped clean daily by cleaning crews and when you arrive each morning you find an assortment of those keys toggled on or off.
(I have even locked my Windows account on occasion due to not noticing a combination of Caps Lock / Num Lock toggled on/off in the morning)
Source: I’ve been in the office working when they came through.
A small plastic cage that slips over a key and doesn't allow it to be pushed by accident, but still allows it to be pushed with extra force.
Kinda like the safety on a glock.
I believe earlier versions had an initial heavy trigger that lightened once it was past the "safety" point.
I don't know first hand, this was just from a passing discussion with a police officer.
It'd be easier to train myself to hit shift+caps (as a ctrl) with just my pinkie than to do the palm + pinkie method, I think. Again, probably a hardware difference.