Nah. Everyone knows the ONE TRUE WAY is using <Shift><Del> and <Shift><Ins> (and <Ctrl><Ins> for Copy).
(I only bring this up because I mouse with my left hand, and I was happy when I discovered those combinations, which use the right hand. Awkward at first, but useful. Gotta spread the Word.)
Ah yes. She used to have me do this as well. It didn’t end well.
To the poster above who mentioned people who share email addresses/passwords – oh my aching head. Not my mother this time, but my ex used to be furious that I wouldn’t give him my email password because that obviously meant I was cheating on him. No it didn’t, you numbwit; it meant that I didn’t want to find out, again, that you were sending out emails posing as me to friends and contacts that were so awful that, fortunately, they contacted me outside of email to suggest my account had been hijacked. I did, however, lose a couple of important friendships that way. I am no longer that naive or trusting of anyone, ever.
I would think these are former Windows users who switched to Mac. I have the opposite problem when I get on a Windows machine - constantly quitting apps when I just wanted to close the window.
That baffles me, too. Back when Apple was endlessly promoting their then-new “Spotlight” search technology, and Microsoft was hyping something similar for Windows, I asked on my OS X mailing list, “Why is this even needed? Don’t people know where their stuff is?” and the answer I got was basically, “No, they don’t, sadly”, for all the reasons you’ve stated. I boggled. I know exactly where all of my thousands of created files are, and have a uniform system for keeping them organized. Of course, it helps that I’ve never used, say, iPhoto, because I’ve been using the same 3rd-party photo-management program for years, since before iPhoto existed, and it continues to serve my needs.
This is one major difference between Mac and Windows paradigms - Mac is “document-centric” while Windows is “application-centric”. So on a Mac, there is no “application window”. Every window is/represents a “document”, and anything you do to/with that window only has an effect on the document level. The application-level stuff is handled via the ever-present menubar at the top of the screen. So click those red boxes to close the windows, and the menubar stays the same.
I still do that, but mainly because just about every document I create has at least a chance of eventually being uploaded to the Internet and linked. And I hate URLs that look like this:
www.website.com/vacationpictures/me%20and%20joe%20at$20wall%20drug.jpg
I admit that I still put the doublespace after every period. I’m a good enough typist where the difference in time is infinitesimal.
What bugs me is that if you’re trying to help someone on their computer and you’re standing next to them as they enter their keystrokes, they use the hunt and peck method. OK, so everyone doesn’t know the keyboard. But then they put numbers in, and they put them in one…digit…at…a…time. They act as if they keys rearrange themselves with every stroke. Hey, genius- did you ever notice that THE NUMBER KEYS ARE IN ORDER?
Comic Sans Font, used at work in your sig, in bright multicolor.
For me, at work I save every work related message in the Saved folder, and clean out the junk and deleted every day. But people here and at my last job have folders in their inbox for “this client”, “that co-worker”, and put the emails in accordingly. We’re running outlook here, if you want to search for the email Charles sent you 2 years ago, search for his name, or even a key word in the mail ; it’ll come up. Stop going to the billion “Charles” folders you have set up for some reason, and scroll up and down, up and down… “Oh maybe it’s in the other “Charles” folder…”
My mother can’t log into her email from her sister’s house. Or from mine. Or from Littlebro’s. OTOH, Littlebro and I can do it, and I’m sure my aunt would be able to do it if we gave her the password: the utter inability to remember how to access her email other than by using the shortcut on her desktop is part of Mom’s general policy of neediness. I sometimes think that woman would never have learned to wipe her own butt, if she’d been able to get away with it.
Oh god, I love you. (I use the mouse with either hand, but I try to remember to use it with the left to give my hand a rest).
I admit that I am guilty of never actually reading and opening most of my emails. I’m up to over 7000 emails in my gmail account now. Not important enough to read, and I lack the will to check the box and delete them. Easier to let them just stack up and it doesn’t bother me.
I also have my laptop set to sleep when I close the lid, and got burned when I discovered it wasn’t doing it automatically after I bought it. Ended up going without most of the battery on a long flight, ugh.
I also don’t mind having tons of icons on my desktop (though I don’t currently).
I do believe in keyboard shortcuts and big resolutions, so, I’m not all evil 
The only time that anything leaves my Deleted folder is when I tell the system I want stuff to leave my deleted folder.
And regarding the “entire point of it’s existence” - I’m pretty sure there is absolutely no universal law or even convention that there is a predefined time period when things will be purged from the Deleted folder.
For some people, that time period may be every day, for others it could be every month and for others it could be every decade.
My flatmate is obsessed with his hard drives and thinks every time he hears it start or stop spinning it’s one (significant) step closer to eventually wearing out. So he puts his Mac to sleep all the time to stop the disks spinning, but it starts up again every time he clicks the mouse or knocks a USB cable so it comes loose (which seems to happen a lot). This will always be followed by complaints about the hard drive destroying itself. He won’t try to change the settings so it doesn’t come out of sleep so easily, or accept that the disks are made to spin, or do anything that removes the opportunity to complain about this terrible situation.
Hmm, yes, those were introduced with very early versions of Windows, but they still work in many cases. I think Ctrl-C, etc. were introduced with Windows 3.0 (blatant copy from the Mac, that).
But beware: on Windows XP (and possibly other versions), if you highlight a file in Windows Explorer and press Shift-Del , you’re deleting the file. Not just cutting it, not just sending it to the Recycle Bin: this is the permanent, irreversible never-see-it-again delete. You’ll probably get a confirmation prompt, though.
I guess they figured nobody remembered about those old shortcuts and they could recycle them.
<You_may_already_know>
Well, if you’re using GMail.com directly, there’s the whole notion of archiving: you can easily remove stuff from your Inbox without actually deleting it. It’ll still be visible if you look at the “All messages” section, and searchable too.
So you can have a near-empty Inbox without really filing anything, and when you want to look at last year’s baby shower invitation you won’t have to wade through the Trash.
</ You_may_already_know>
Good warning there. Ironically, I always use <shift><Del> to delete files, so I can’t claim ignorance. (So I don’t fill up the recycle bin. I tend to fill up my hard drive now and then. Also, I seem to recall it’s faster when deleting lots of files.)
I’ve only used those three commands in terms of Cut, Copy, and Pasting text, and never noticed the one command was the same as I used for deleting files.
My dad when in his late 70s (now dead) would come over and get on our main computer in our living room and sort through bookmarks in detail looking for anything “interesting.” There was no porn on the computer, but if he found a link even slightly risque, he would announce to everyone in the room (including our under age 10 kids) “I just found a pornographic link on [Kansas Beekeeper’s] computer.”
My snowbird inlaws stop by twice a year on their way from north to south and back. Although they have a free webmail account, they and their friends somehow have it in their heads that email is tied to persons’ houses. So, when the inlaws start their biannual journey north or south and are approaching our house, their friends start sending me (not even my wife?) email that should go to my inlaws. It consists of glurge, pictures of kittens, religious rant, inspirational stories, urban legends and recipes that would kill even a much younger person. Then, when my inlaws get here, they want to use my email account to read their email.
I guess I got lucky with my now-68-year-old mom and computers. She’d never touched a computer in her life before, in her fifties, she married my stepfather, who is a computer enthusiast. He got my mom a Mac and taught her to use it, and she took to it like a fish to water. She knows what she’s doing, and now also happily uses a smartphone and iPad.
I can tolerate a screen full of icons but not when they are spread randomly all over the screen.
Please use auto-arrange once in awhile. Do these people dislike rows and columns?
I’ve been so tempted to stealthily organize some of my co-workers desktops.
Yeah I know that’s my OCD kicking in but dammit it chaps my nads nonetheless.
My husband has it far worse than I do, because he is the de facto tech support for his mother. Every time she opens a link her sister forwards her of a cute kitten with a cute virus or can’t find the file she filed “somewhere,” my husband gets the call of alarm.
I, OTOH, am the research department. Only I can do the heavy-duty research needed to find out the name of the wonderful band they heard in the park last week, and the name of the lead singer who smiled at them, and where they will be appearing next.
Only I can find a recipe for whole wheat bread with all of the fat replaced with flax seed. (And wouldn’t it be nice if I could test it first for her?)
Only I can find out where she should park if she goes to the art museum and how much it will cost. No, she doesn’t want to call the museum and bother them. Don’t I want to help her?
Would you be happy if they are spread all over the screen, but deliberately? It really fucks up my workflow if an icon I intentionally placed in a specific location is spontaneously moved by the computer just to line up a column and make it look pretty. I can’t find it anymore.
I think this is my mother’s line of thinking. She’s convinced she can only access her email from **her **computer. I signed in to my email account from her computer to show her I could access mine, and she had a moment of near-hysteria because she was convinced I’d deleted her email account.
Even after showing her, she is still positive she can’t get her email anywhere but her own computer.
I think the source of that thinking goes back to the time of Outlook as the major email program, prior to the web-based browser concept most used today.
Messages were downloaded from the email server and stored locally. While you could set up Outlook on another computer, it was somewhat complicated and geek-oriented, and you would not have access to your previously stored emails since they were on another computer. Hence: “They’re gone!”
Web-based email programs are a different animal, but since their overall function is the same, people don’t know the difference.