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Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F
Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
While you are at it, teach them CTRL+C (Command+C) and CTRL+V and CTRL+A. At least 25% of users have never seen any of these amazing combos in action either.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
F3.
I use it all the time but what happens is not always what you expect.
If you're lucky it searches or it does nothing.
Usually (even in firefox) just typing / to find something just works...
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
While reaching for my coffee sitting in the DVD drive tray and stepping on the mouse with my foot, it's hard to do a ctrl-F while shaving using a CD for a mirror and texting on the phone.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I was just Ctrl+Fing "Ctrl+F" on slashdot, because a friend had told me about the ctrl-f story.
I wish there were a hotkey for capital letters, so I won't have to PUSH SHIFT BUTTON ALL THE TIME
Is this surprising? People expect useful controls to be easily discoverable. Keyboard shortcuts don't fall into this category. Find is either hidden under menus (which no-one uses any more) or behind the ambiguous magnifying glass icon which is also used for zoom.
Browsers have search bars. Search in this page should be a suggested action whenever someone types a word in there (I'm sure that's already implemented somewhere) - that's discoverable. Word processors just have too many functions - people don't like to explore because it's overwhelming. This shouldn't be news to anyone.
That people do not know commands is _data_ . Why becomes speculation. I know all my commands because I'm still a CLI dinosaur. I still use / (no dot :) to find strings because it works on my main tools -- vim, mutt, links and occasionally seamonkey.
I would speculate computer inability is rooted in the whole GUI paradigm -- if it isn't on some menu you cannot do it. Good luck finding it with Microsoft changing their menus, especially the _huge_ change with the MS-Office2007 "ribbon". It might be good (???), but change comes at a cost. Very uncertain there is a payoff.
(it's a COMMAND + F on a Mac!)
This has to be the one feature I wish the iPad would add, a freaking "find" feature.
You know they praise the iPad for all it's wonder and a simple usability flaw such as this is still prevalent.
It's ESC, :, ?searchstring you insensitiv clod.
1/2 of every one is below average. The 1/4 above that ain't so special either. Let them spend some time reading instead of using crtl-F.. maybe they will learn something.
Can we make these standard keys on a keyboard as standard? They're used universally in many apps, so it would be great to have them as well. There should be a 'keyboard' equivalent of the W3C or IEEE organizations.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Fundamentally people need to be taught that mindless repetitive tasks are something that the computer can do for them. That the computers are the slaves.
Look, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but most people don't know their ass from... hey, what's that in the ground over there? When they go to perform a new task their first question isn't "how easy is this?" but "why are you trying to hard to read that word? are you a fag?" Most people are not aware of too many things, but they know what they know, and aren't remotely interested in learning anything outside of their world view.
Some people are different. They want to learn for the sake of learning. We call them geeks, or nerds. Or, when they are coming on all superior to some non-nerd, they are called an asshole.
Maybe applications need to find a less obtrusive way of popping up hints, because most users need them; they won't go looking. Shit, it took me months to get my lady, who is quite intelligent, to take the windows tour. Once she did, much was revealed that was formerly opaque.
Finally, have you ever noticed how many people don't even have the basic computer skills in their job description? I've found this to be especially egregious in academia. Explaining basic Office functions to a counselor for the 23523312th time is tiring, to say the least. Isn't this a school? Aren't there classes for this crap that you could take for free? Whoever is pretending to manage these assholes needs to fuck off immediately.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Millions of Americans waste their lives scanning countles hours of tv for small bits of humor...
Smart people don't bother with office suites. Smart people, even those who aren't technically-inclined, use LaTeX and a plain old text editor.
My executive assistant uses LaTeX to prepare all of our correspondence. Her education was in sociology, and she'd never seen LaTeX before, but she picked it up within two days. It makes our documents look crisp and professional, with minimal effort. It's also extremely easy to generate a PDF, if we need to digitally transmit our documents. She can prepare a document much quicker than the EAs of my colleagues can, and they all insist on using MS Office and other office suites. Best of all, using LaTeX doesn't affect our bottom line at all, and documents we prepared over 20 years ago still work perfectly today.
That's why you can make a LOT of money by selling computers that are very simply and easy to use. That market is much bigger than the one that wants complicated computers with a ton of features. Most people just don't like computers, and they don't care to make computers a central part of their daily existence.
As far as commonly used, time saving keystrokes, what always shocks me is when a fellow programmer doesn't know about tab completion. You mean you're really going to type out that whole long-ass file name?
It's the shortcut key for boldface text ("fetstil") in the Swedish version of Microsoft Office. This would make sense, sort of, except that Swedish Notepad, WordPad and Explorer still use Ctrl+F as a shortcut for finding. Whenever I hear someone praising the consistency of Microsoft's user interface, I can only assume that he or she is joking.
No no no, ctrl+f turns text into bold, ctrl+b searches.
Ohhh... you meant on English OS.
No, I'm serious! Make the gesture like a question mark (maybe without the little "." so as to not confuse the system). It would seem to be very easy to implement and everyone would instantly recognize it! If you want it could bring up a multipurpose "question box" which could do a number of things (like help or spelling) in addition to "find".
Too bad a said this out on a public forum. Now I (assume) I can't patent it. Well at least the Guess Jeans company hasn't trademarked it!
Next in news: Asa Dotzler proposes to drop keyboard shortcuts support in FireFox.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Oh, you mean like the three shells thing?
I have the opposite problem. I try to use Ctrl+F (well, grep actually) in the real world. Don't tell me you haven't. I can't recall the number of times I've been reading a book, deciding I want to search for something, and caught myself thinking "I'll just grep for.... oh shit."
It happens less and less now, since I've started using the iPad as a book reader. Now the only really annoying thing is getting a non-searchable PDF, which is fortunately pretty rare.
I was amazed (and I still am) at how clumsy my girlfriend is when trying to write code. Not because she is a bad programmer, to the contrary. But she lacks basic skills like using the TAB key for indenting, for holding shift and moving the cursor to a certain direction. How moving from word to word can be done by holding CTRL pressed as well. I guess this sort of amateurism in basic editing skills (and basic operating skills) is due to the fact that software is now friendlier. Maybe too friendly.
Ctrl+V enables raw keycode input in your shell. For example, Ctrl+v ESC c is what you type in to issue the terminal reset command to the shell. The ESC is not intrpreted when you press it, but is passed through to output as \033, the shell escape character.
..where Europe is on a map. This directly affects their lives in a way.
At least we have the right to vote.
And own a gun, or many guns for that matter.
Who needs to be able to think or be curious about how things work?
For those using Firefox, just look at the SearchWP extension (and associated SearchBox Sync), it highlights each word (or "group of words") from the search bar in open pages (with post-it like colors, look at Cutomize... to add a button looking like a fluorescent marker to disable/enable hi-lightening if it becomes too "heavy", I put it just to the right of the search bar). It also turns words in the search bar into separate search buttons, just clic them to select successive occurences (just have to clic on the leftmost or rightmost area of the text field of the search bar where the cursor becomes a text insertion instead of a hand to edit its content as normal text).
Highly convenient: multiple independent searches at once, much more useful than the Ctrl+F search.
If this way or working is so good, why hasn't someone, somewhere added it their pool of obvious and trivial patents? since so many organisations make their living from peeing in the pool of knowledge, this would seem to be an obvious candidate.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You really would be surprised at how people struggle with something that might seem totally intuitive to you. Take a pop sample of 10 people and the gesture they would use to bring up "find" or "help" and you might end up with 10 different gestures (or x gestures + x IDKs).
So why did Microsoft choose F4 instead of ctrl+F for Outlook? Idiots.
Apple has surely already patented that gesture. If not Apple, then HP picked it up when they bought Palm. If it is neither you better hurry. Microsoft is filing as I type.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
... study finds most people do not know alt+f4 either, but after being advised to use it will never forget it again.
even techies some of them don't know alt+tab. Toggle between open apps. But ctrl+f has been instrumental in my e-life
Of course, they're always surprised that CTRL-Z won't make an email they just sent come back.
In other words, some interactions with external systems are irreversible. But this can be worked around whenever the interactions can run as a batch as opposed to interactively. For example, an e-mail client can implement undo send by holding the message in the outbox for several minutes before actually sending it.
"We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas." I wouldn't be surprised if schools are still teaching the use of the card catalog.
It's called survival of the fittest. Let them figure it out or fail. If some one is too lazy to go to the task bar and see what options are available, they deserve doing it the hard way...
However on apple keyboards command is right next to the spacebar, so it is very easy to use.
Is it south of X? south of C? It depends on the keyboard and how many keys are to its left. One might aim for Command and hit Space, or one might aim for Command and hit Option.
I can command -c in a terminal window without a gay work around, where as if you ctrl -c in a terminal window you close it not copy the text.
I agree that the workaround on Windows in inconvenient, but the GNOME terminal's workaround is sensible: Ctrl+Shift+C to copy, Ctrl+Shift+V to paste. Now is this a "Happy, joyful, and lively" workaround, a "Festive, bright, or colourful" workaround, or an "Effeminate or flamboyant in behavior" workaround?
I've seen this since the 1990's, most computer users even in a corporate environment don't know what the shortcut keys are. Even less know that the alt key plus the underline character in a menu can be make into a shortcut by holding down the alt key and the underlined letter as a shortcut.
I remember working for a FORTUNE 500 company and the help desk asking that the feature to search be added to my program, it already was, and I said "just try a control-f and the user can find any text in the edit area. the feature has been there since day one. Here is a FAQ file and the F1 key will load the help file to see more help." only to have them get mad at me and insist that the feature is not there and add it. They had no idea it was built into Windows, nor did the help desk, and that practically every program that uses a text box edit field has it. But for some reason it was my problem and I should add in the feature to my program in order to assist the users and help desk. They must have requested it hundreds of times, and had no clue it was always there, even with a "Find" on a button, and "Find" on the drop down menu, and control-F built into Windows.
Another thing was searching for active and inactive records, I had a drop down combo box that had active and inactive in it, it was on the main search page. They requested a feature to add in a search for inactive and active status for records, it too was in there since day one and part of the FAQ and help file. Still they claimed it was not.
But like always it was a programming problem, and written up on my performance review that I was not adding in features the users wanted, even if the features were always there since day one and fully documented. I later found out the trainers had skipped those areas because they were documented and they figured the users would read the FAQ or hit F1 to learn more about it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
These functions are available through the GUI, as well, and yet they languish unused there, too. It isn't just the learning of control key combinations that is the problem; it is the conceptual approach most people have to a computer. They treat it like an instrument of blunt force, when it is a finely tuned and nuanced instrument.
Too bad a said this out on a public forum. Now I (assume) I can't patent it.
Most of the world is "first to file" not "first to invent" and, iirc, the US is in the process of chaning to "first to file" too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
first off, he would probably spell artillery, & the, correctly, so as to not goof up the whole ctrl+Fing thing.
then, as any genuine human of high authority would do, he would see to it that ALL of the creators' innocents under his watch were well protected & cared for appropriately, no matter what resources need be developed. if we recall, the captain set dozens of populations & planets 'back on their feet' during his career.
do we need a genuine capt. kirk style hero now, or what if we are it? hold on to your holograms, the best has yet to come. see you there.
In localized versions of Office, Microsoft changes even the keyboard shortcuts (at least for my language), CTRL+F becomes CTRL+L (Localizar).
Except on broken web pages that intercept keyboard commands, such as slashdot.
Isn't it safe to say that most people in the world don't own computers? Maybe this article should be titled "Most Users Have Never Heard of CTRL+F".
TAB - Move to next field
SHIFT-TAB - Move to previous field
ENTER/RETURN - Submit
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'd be really happy if i could get CTRL+C CTRL+K working onboard :)
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Computer illiterates are supposed to use ipads and we the professionals are there to make their interactions with programs seamless and easy.
That said, I had to check what CTRL+F does...
Apparently keyboard shortcuts are only known by muscle memory to me ;-)
People are just used to use the mouse to do all things... Only people like me (yeah, i am not young anymore) who have used Wordstar, WordPerfect, and all those programs in the old DOS days are more likely to still continue to use keystrokes combinations to do things...
and I seriously hate the Ribbon menu.. I believe the Button menu can do whatever the Ribbon does... don't understand why MS wants to change it...
Every single time I use (someone else's copy of) Google Chrome and want to find something in a page, I press / and finish typing the text string before I realise that Google decided not to include that particular feature. Then, I spend ten seconds trying to remember what that other keyboard command is and wonder why the search box doesn't disappear by itself when I've finished with it.
Fix it Google!
Love knowing these, but instead of CNTL-F I have always used the F3 key. One less button to punch :)
push and pop are my fav tricks to show fellows. They will just happily go about up and down the tree to get to the same places never realizing they can bookmark a location and pop back when done with something else.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I mean given how many people I've seen use computers that never learned to type which would actually be more immediately useful than ctrl-f
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
If they don't know the simple commands, the best one to teach them is ALT-F4!
Hell, most people can't tell the difference between a crookedly scanned all-image PDF and a Word document.
Then there are the clients who have shit fits when I tell them I can't make a 50 page fax that's obviously a print-out of an Excel or Word document go *bloop* into a database and that I need the actual file emailed to me otherwise I'll have to give them a data entry charge.
Yes, I've heard of OCR. I haven't heard of OCR that works well enough.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
At least once a year someone asks for a page search, as in: "Can we add something that allows us to easily search this one particular page for some text. If you can't do that is there a browser plug-in or something we can use?"
A better skill to teach is menu exploration. Find, Select All, Undo, Replace, and a zillion application-specific gems are in the menus, together with their shortcuts. An even better meta-skill is generic program exploration, with an emphasis on not screwing things up. When I encounter a new program for the first time, I always find the Settings/Preferences/Options and at least glance through them. If it's a type of program I'm not familiar with I definitely look through the menus. I right click places that might be right-clickable and explore the ensuing context menus, I try double clicking, I sometimes try control-clicking, and I generally see what the program does in response to standard inputs. Some people seem to think I have magical abilities when they watch me run a program I've never encountered before, but they just miss the conventions and tests that I don't. Most people are capable of picking up on these skills pretty quickly if they're given some examples and told what's going on.
Me: Hey, Slashdot says 90% of people don't know what Ctrl-F does. That sounds pretty low to me.
My wife (who's in IT): Ctrl-what?
Me: Ctrl-F. You know, for searching on a page.
WIfe: Oh, yeah. Well, why would you ever use Ctrl-F when you can just hit F3?
Me: F3?
(hits F3)
Me: Oh.
no text
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The number of times I've shown colleagues something in a shell, finished my demonstration and logged out with CTRL-D... and they ask me "how did you do that?"
....I actually had to think about what Ctrl+F does for a second. It's become that natural to me, almost second nature. Keyboard shortcuts, especially those that are universal across many systems, are so often forgotten. I'm baffled at the amount that my "Technical" co-workers rely on mice and UI elements for navigation, functions, and the like.
Ctrl-F works great if you know the word you are looking for, however, sometimes I'm looking for a picture or more loosely a concept. I know I've seen it, and in my subconscuous I have an idea of what it looks like which is why I like to flip through a dead-tree manual.
I want google to enhance the Android to provide a document reader with a mutli-touch interface that displays a book like the iPod's scrolling album covers. A quick fling of my finger across the screen to rapidly display many page images at once.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I worked at a newspaper and would see journalists and editors doing things like searching for words completely manually. I would say, "hey I have a very quick tip for you that will save you hours every single day for the rest of your career. In fact, it'll save much, much more time TODAY than it takes to teach it to you." and they would say "I don't have time!!! I have too much work to do!!!." Often I would just jump in and show someone how to do it, doing search and replaces in less than 10 seconds that would take them well over 30 minutes. That impressed a few people enough for them to start using it. But I found that many of them would persist in doing it manually anyway because it was just "easier." So what I discovered is that there are a lot of people who will work their fingers to the bone, unnecessarily spend hours working instead of enjoying life (these people were all salaried), even injure themselves with repetitive stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and so forth, to save the slightest mental effort involved in learning something very slightly new.
Much more importantly the majority of people that I come in contact with don't know what CTRL and SHIFT do when selecting items in a drop down box.
We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.
\u262D = \u5350
Too bad a said this out on a public forum. Now I (assume) I can't patent it. Well at least the Guess Jeans company hasn't trademarked it!
silly you! just patent in the usa, works nicely. too bad it's probably patented already a thousand times.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
MS used to have good keyboard shortcuts. MacOS pretty good for OS, but not so good for software without digging. Now it seems very broken.
I'd rather not use the mouse if at all possible. I know many here will agree. With the advent of AJAX interfaces keyboard shortcuts are out the window. And browser mouse clicks are a recognized attack vector. Is this intentional?
The mouse-and-clickers have taken over (due to consumer demand).
1.Bring back keyboarding! Neutral hand position.
2.Less wasted movement.
3.More efficient.
4.Profit.
I don't think it's due to schools that ppl don't know this stuff but rather a young versus older generation thing. I can't for the life of me know where I learnt the cntr F Command but I can be sure that my Dad and uncle don't know what it is.
Joey
www.duckprint.com.au
Unique doona cover designs
You know what ctrl & alt keys you can use by reading them off the menu before selecting the menu option, this requires curiosity and a ability to learn. Education has nothing to do with it. Its called not being a mindless robot and being able to learn things on your own.
I am a high school teacher librarian, and I am surprised at how many of the "digitally native" high school students are totally amazed when I teach them about CTRL+F.
F3 does it in most applications, firefox, chrome, office etc. why fuck about with 2 keys? the ONLY place I can think where you NEED ctrl+F is on the windows desktop where it was a leftover from windows95. but hey that broken windows search usually keeps people from using that
For thendecisive lot, gotta show them Ctrl+y along with Ctrl+z.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
I find people think that the mouse is supposed to be some kind of replacement and/or is superior to the keyboard.
When I'm training people at work they're always asking me to slow down, show them 'how I did that', because they see me functioning rapidly (yes even in MS Windows) without using the mouse often. They are always amazed to hear about the edit keys, CTRL-S to save quickly and often, the CTRL-F mentioned here, as well as undo and redo via the keyboard only.
They are often confused - looking perplexed because they bought into the idea of the mouse as some sort of improvement over the keyboard. So i let them know that it's more of a case of 'the right tool for the right job' than it is a case of one being better than the other in any kind of broadly-based way.
Until the rest of you cavemen start using Dvorak, you haven't much room to talk...
It's Strg+F instead!
F3 doesn't work in Word or Acrobat
Unfortunately in Outlook it forwards the email you are looking at, rather than it being for find, quite annoying when it seems to be the standard in every other app.
The most important one is CTRL or COMMAND-S. How many times have you heard sob stories from people telling you that they just typed in a long essay or letter and forgot to save it? Sure, there's autosave for some word processors, but I've seen plenty of people that have no clue where to look for it. Their work is just "gone". I've told students that if they haven't developed a compulsive, every-5-or-10-minutes "CTRL-S twitch", and haven't saved multiple versions in multiple places, then they're going to be wasting a *LOT* of time during their educational and subsequent career retyping things. I mean, ye gods, "Untitled Document" wasn't a clue? Actually, now that I think about it, a useful message would be after 10 minutes without saving an initially-created document, a word processor should put up a message reminding the user to save it somewhere. I find nagging like that annoying, but oh the untold horrors it would save so many people (just make sure there's a button to turn it off in Preferences somewhere).
Now - type something, move right (or left) hand to the mouse - highlight - move mouse to menu - select - press mouse button - find "home" row again and start typing.
No wonder kids today use short-forms and misspellings and such In the mean time - I take full advantage of what key-combination commands there are - and get a lot more done
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
n/t
You really would be surprised at how people struggle with something that might seem totally intuitive to you. Take a pop sample of 10 people and the gesture they would use to bring up "find" or "help" and you might end up with 10 different gestures (or x gestures + x IDKs).
No, you typically get one gesture. It just isn't one that adapts to the keyboard or pad easily. But it's pretty obvious visually.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I always have a shortcut to Notepad readily available for doing just that: stripping out formatting.
Why the fuck is this a troll? In an article about how great keyboard shortcuts are, somebody has the audacity to point out that the lack of said shortcuts are another shortcoming of the over-hyped iPad. It is not particularly insightful, but in light of what is happening in computing today it is both relevant and pertinent.
Yet some douchy Apple fanboi (or astroturfer) marks it a troll because you can't criticize their wonderful products. And the Slashmods let it stand. Great.
In a way, I am grateful. I will bookmark this comment to use as evidence of the douchiness of Apple fanbois.
With the minimization of GUIs and the loss of the main menu in a lot of applications I find that alt-f is a good thing to know.. it usually bring back (temporarily) the regular menu where you can select the thing you want and for bonus points most of the time there is usually a helper text there for the key-combo for that item.
Dude, paste-without-formatting is essential for anyone who spends a lot of time cutting and pasting between applications into compound documents.
There are so many whiney paste-related comments in this chain that it is time for one of my rarer than Haley's Comet posts to /.
Immediately (if not sooner), get thy focus to CNET.com, click on the downloads tab, and search on Pure Text.
Both Pure Text and Pure Text Plus are free and legal programs that turn your Windows-Key-V combination into a paste-without-format key.
(Be sure to decline the offer to install the Bing toolbar upon installation.)
I use Pure Text so much, it is one of the few programs I run in my start-up group.
My work here is done.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
F is a considered a grade to be afraid and to avoid. We can't have CTRL+F as in control failure! The ponies. Although a controlled failure is always better than an uncontrolled one. Hot grits.
It's in the menu of all browsers I'm aware of. If people don't even care enough to look through the menu of an application they use all the time, I don't think they will remember this magic key combination. I say magic because for them it is magic, and you're the magician. You try to show them something (that they could have easily discovered on their own), they will always come back to you to watch you do the trick again.
You are so right. We need to get beyond the desktop metaphor. Yet, this very /. group collectively gnash their teeth when Apple tries to move beyond the file system, for the typical user. All you can hear (um...see) is posts complying that Apple is rooming easy default access to the file system. It is so funny that these are the same people that say they want progress.
Which is used for search in my locale (because "bold" starts with an F in my locale and so ctrl-F is used for toggling bold text...) - but only in _some_ applications, others use ctrl-F.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fuck all you idiots who send me a Word document containing a JPEG, GIF, or BMP of a spreadsheet that I'm supposed to gather data off of. FUCK YOU WITH BEANS!
We already knew that people don't read manuals, and many even seem proud of it. Why should we expect them to know how to use their software?
I was a cheap bastard in college, and when my mouse broke I just learned how to use the keyboard to do everything. I even used the number pad as my mouse when playing EverQuest...
One warning about using shortcuts; if you use them at a place that's assessing your software skills / knowledge using software that asks you to accomplish tasks like copy and paste, or access a function from the menus, you'll find they aren't shortcut friendly. I've lost points on tests because I could remember a sequence of 3 keys to open the correct window, select the next sub menu and then the action I was asked to perform. While I still had 95% accuracy on these tests it was still annoying.
Well, there is that "recall" function that some e-mail clients honour.
Of course, some people seem to think it completely wipes all traces of the original e-mail, when it is more a "Hey! You know that e-mail I sent you that you'd ignored as spam? I really didn't mean to send it to you, it may have something embarrassing in it."
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
How do I do ctrl-F in Android?
One of the first things I show people. I never get tired of saying "ctrl-f is your friend". Some folks don't want to change. Maybe people prefer the cognitive security scrolling and hunting provides? "I watch the document scroll by as I find words. Thererefore I know the document is still the same." As opposed to "I enter a phrase into some box and these little highlighted results show up and if I punch next the screen seems to jump, perhaps willy-nilly to a different place. I don't trust this." It's like people need the continuity of the scroll.
Agreed. For years I was using copy and paste into a text editor to strip out formatting... a year or two ago I started using a utility called "PureText". Now using "Windows+V" will do what amounts to "paste without formatting" in any application.
If it is truly important, it should have an easily identifiable counterpart in the GUI. Shortcuts should always be a second method for power users. I think were getting better on this, many apps are copying web browsers, with dedicated search boxes in plain sight.
unless the halting problem is solved. Computers are Turing machines. 1+1=2 no matter how many people insist 1+1=3 for small values of 3.
When the trackball on my work-provided Blackberry (read free) broke down a week after purchase I was forced to learn ways around it. I still use many of them.
Space bar to "Page Down" Also works to shoot in brickbreaker - this is handy because you can control the left/right with the trackball which worked in those directions only and control the shooting independently
Alt + Back to switch applications. Soon replaced by
Holding down BB button navigate through applications.
a few years ago which I've been maintaining.every since. A user reported last week that every time he hits Ctrl-X to cut text for pasting, that the app crashed. In fact, the app exited with no error window. Whatever I might have to say about the previous programmer's style, at least he didn't have empty try/catches everywhere so I found it hard to believe the app was crashing without any exception window.
Turns out, the main window had a keyboard event which exits the app when Ctrl-X is pressed with no prompting first. I've always used keyboard shortcuts and took it for granted thinking everyone else did until I realized it took years for a "power user" to hit this problem for the first time.
"Paste and Match Style" people! It's ironic that you'd suggest such a convoluted time-wasting method for striping formatting when there is a single simple command bound to a key sequence that accomplishes the task. Not only that but it will match the formatting, if any, you have set up into the document you're pasting into, which is what you want anyway.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
I don't bother with ctl+f on web-pages for the simple reason it far more often does not work. The result is nothing found. Even on pages browsed to via google because google says the search terms are on the page.
In documents ctl+f works 100% of the time for me. In web-browsers, about 1%.
Always amazes me that people use Caps lock instead of shift, first you have to turn it on and then you have to turn it off. The same people who do this are the ones who ring up the helpdesk most often to unlock their account.
In the ancient time, Apple had some nice documents about building UI. You could read that when interacting with the UI to build a sentence, the subject could be an on-screen object (a paragraph, a file icon), but that verbs (like search or copy) would be difficult to draw as a picture (with exception of well established things like a square for "stop"), and hence would nicely fit as menu items. This had the advantage that the user could discover all verbs in menus, with their associated shortcuts.
Then someone introduced action icons, with things like icons bar in MS Office. Users do not navigate menus anymore. They do not discover new verbs, neither do they learn shortcuts. The funny thing is that iccon actions carry a tribute the to the statement that verbs cannot be drawn as pictures: when your mouse pointer flies over it, a text appears so that you can have an idea of what it does.
What about the Ctrl+Shift+T for reopen a closed tab!?
This is amusing, because the folks at Chrome have been asked repeatedly to include an option for "search on type" (as available on Firefox) and have repeatedly refused to include this, on the grounds that "Ctrl+F" works just fine.
I completely disagree. The most valuable resource I have is real estate in my brain. Yes, I know "Ctrl+F". and often use it. But I don't know, I don't want to know, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+H, etc. Put them on a menu, in English.
The purpose of a user interface is ***NOT*** to minimize keystrokes, nor to minimze mouse clicks. It is to minimize the junk you need to know to use the program. A lady who hasn't found Edit / Find on the menu is just plain dumb. But a lady who uses Edit / Find instead of Ctrl+F is using her brain for what she gets paid to use it for - keeping her boss happy.
Thirty years ago I argued that we were mistaken in writing our programs for "expert users". Even then people had so many different programs to use every day that nobody had time to become an "expert" in any one of them. That is even more true today. I have Ctrl+F on my PC, but not on my phone, so why should I memorize it?
People who love Ctrl+F probably love VI, the second worst editor ever invented (The worst is emacs, which is VI with unpredictable macros; sit down at a friend's computer and run emacs and you have no idea what Ctrl+F does on HIS machine.)
Keep it simple, keep it obvious.
People already know how to search for text on paper, and the method seems to work on screen too. When they want to make text bold, the only way they're going to do it is to hunt for the bold command; they'll spot it on the toolbar and click it. Most users won't use ^B. But if they want to search, they can just scroll and scroll and scroll, hence they won't look for the search button, even though that's on the toolbar too. Why would it occur to people to learn to do something that they can already do?
I was just fired from my tech support position so I no longer give a rats rectum about people that don't know how to copy, cut, paste, undo or find. Let them use webTV and their IPhones.
Really if you are older than 6 or younger than 50 you should at least understand the copy and paste concept.
Growing up I educated myself using magazines, books, and BBSs and I am just amazed at what the web has become. I some times wonder what it would be like growing up with modern PC's and the internet available. Although I have to say that some info has become less available. I remember quite a few academic journals that used to be free to access or accessible using URL hacks, that are now pay only.
One of the best developers in our company... I'm the spec writer... I told him "and make sure Alt-F4 works".... he asked me what that is. Fuck. And I thought that was bad
I never heard of it. I will use F3 now to find out about it.
If they're going to use Ctrl +Z they should also learn about Ctrl + Y.
No news here. Unfortunately.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So on a mostly unrelated note, I just discovered that slashdot supports HJKL for left/down/up/right. Blew my mind.
Knowing keyboard triggers is nice, but to me this means there's a much broader issue. 90% of computer users don't know how to skim through the MENU BAR to see what features are available.
I have a friend who bought a dirt-cheap Kia that actually had a fast-working heating element in the heater, so it could spit out heat right away without waiting for the engine. This was in a ~$8,000 car, seriously bottom-of-the-line super economy car.
I've never, never found this feature in another car, even those that cost 5 times as much. My car cost three times as much, and is several years newer, and I have to wait for my engine to warm up, like a chump.
What the hell, car makers? I live in Washington State; I need a goddamned fast-working heater! Why is Kia, of all companies, cornering this particular feature?
Comment of the year
teach them at least :q! , :qw and jkl;
Anybody else remember the stupid cardboard template you would place over top of your keyboard in order to remember the 8 gajillion shortcuts that wordperfect used back in the 1990's?
Personally I think the farther removed we are from that sort of foolishness the better. Not to mention that there is nothing to say that whatever "ctrl-???" will continued to be supported into the future by anything. So, yes teaching that would be stupid, just like teaching computers using the manual of some software... Though some have been built into many thing due to long use like ctrl-C or ctrl-break.... anyway the keyboards are full of legacy garbage.
Though this continues to plague software design... forget a feature... add a shortcut. I was horrified to see just the other day, that in MS Access 2010, someone can hide/show the show freaking navigation pane (you know the little thingy that lets you brows through, tables, queries, reports, forms, modules, everything) using F11. Oh and if you made a DB with a loading form, it is by default hidden. It took me awhile of online searching to find the stupid F11. Now I get to impart this "wisdom" on to every new user of MS Access 2010 I meet who will be calling me and going WTF where are all the tables!
Is that in a terminal? What's the combo?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Aside from shortcut keys I cannot believe the number of folks that do not know, understand, or use Alt+PrintScreen and Ctrl+PrintScreen functions.
All of this just reinforces my opinion that 90% of the people that have access to computers should have them taken away.