Keyboards ought to get rid of the additional keys they keep jamming in there, like the ones with a bank or home or play symbol, because they’re bollocks nobody needs, and half the time don’t work unless you use specific programs.
But they should take the CapsLock, NumLock, and ScrollLock, and place them away from every other key, in their own block. And move the Insert key to somewhere similarly distant.
Any key that when accidentally getting hit fucks up something you’re working on, be it computer slowdown, capital letters, or replacing your written words instead of inserting, should be corralled off.
I hate the fn key on my Gateway lappie. It’s where CTRL should be, and I’m an obsessive CTRL+S, +B, and +I user when I’m taking notes or writing a paper. Stupid fn key gets in the damn way.
And I miss my HP AT keyboard. It went clackity-clack and didn’t have a bunch of crap on it that I didn’t need.
F1. Oh, how I loathe the F1 key. Only in my case it isn’t Excel that I have the problem with, it’s AutoCAD. AutoCAD makes vigorous use of the ESC key to cancel commands. Which you do a lot of. It is also right next to the friggen F1 key. AutoCAD is enough of a memory hog that when you accidentally hit the F1 key you have to sit and wait for almost 30-60 seconds for it to load just so you can close the damned window. I popped the little bastard right off my keyboard. If I do need the help window, I just click Help, like any other normal human would.
My mid-90s Sun Sparcstation (a UNIX technical workstation) had the Ctrl key immediately to the left of the “A” key, where PCs often have a Caps Lock key.
My left little finger would often hit both keys while I typed text. If I used software that had PC-like functionality, this types a Ctrl-a, which would select the entire document or file I was typing into. The next keystroke would replace the entire document with whatever character I was hitting. The following keystroke would flush the undo buffer, so the mistake was unrecoverable.
I pried the key from the keyboard and epoxied a guard over the stub, and kept another keyboard on the shelf which I would swap out if I needed to type a control character.
The engineering lab at school was full of those damn keyboards. I hated having to write reports because everytime I’d screw something up because the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys were switched around.
Who thought this was a good idea? I demand an answer.
FWIW, Win+R will open the Run dialog, which is very useful for typing commands and so forth. Even for launching applications, I find it more efficient to type Win+R > winword > Enter than to track down the Word entry in the Start menu.
That was going to be my complaint exactly. I spend 90% of my workday in CAD. I get viciously drafting away, forget to be careful of the F1 key, and everything come to a grinding halt.
Then I have to wait for the help window, curse at it, then click the “x” as loudly as I can and then try to get back and focused.
It’s usually too late by then and I’m already surfing the Dope.
I tried the “remove the F1 Key” method, but I got yelled at by computer support.
Depends on what you’re mucking around in. In Word or email, they’re definitely simple. But, there are always exceptions.
On Unix servers, (using PuTTY as an ssh client) CTRL-C will either abort a running process or just echo “^C” to the command line and do nothing. There’s no right-click menu either - a right-click does the very bizarre thing of an immediate copy and paste right where you’re at. This is probably not what you had in mind.
CTRL-V does even less - it just echos “^V” to the command line.
So yes, CTRL-INS and SHIFT-INS are very useful.
Likewise the INS key to toggle typeover vs insert modes. I use this a lot on mainframes.
My least favorite key? Scroll Lock. It’s generally pointless and has little, if any, practical use.
My most hated key? Num Lock. Whoever had the bright idea of using it to drop a virtual 10-key pad into the alpha section on a laptop should be taken out back and shot. If you want to do 10-key on a laptop, go pick up one of those external 10-key pads and plug it in. On regular “extended” keyboards, there’s no reason to disable the 10-key section other than to annoy people that use that section. If you don’t like the 10-key section, go buy an 88-key (or whatever it is) keyboard and save the desktop space.
I might pry off the “hibernate” key off my keyboard. I never press it, it’s just as easy to hit the big hibernate bar on my laptop. But when I’m typing lots of text I plug in my external, easier-to-type-with keyboard, but there’s not a lot of room between my legs and the top of the desk, so sometimes I have to wait a minute or so while the dang thing goes into hibernate when the edge of the key gets caught on the darn desk…
No. Admittedly, I started doing that before the keys were standardized, but Insert works just fine for me and I don’t have to remember which key is what.
Apparently I accidentally engaged it, and spent a good hour wondering what the hell was wrong with my Excel spreadsheets, as I couldn’t navigate them with my arrow keys anymore. It was frustrating as hell. Sure, there’s a little green indicator light to tell you your scroll lock is engaged, but how often does anyone really look at that?
>Who thought this was a good idea? I demand an answer.
I think Sun thought it was fine when there weren’t MSWindows-like apps for the Sparcstation. If Ctrl-A doesn’t do anything, the key placement isn’t a problem.
It’s pretty easy to imagine somebody thinking it’s then a good idea to make Windows-like Sparc apps. A bit less likely to agree with them, but you can imagine it, eh?
:mad:
