When they dont use keyboard shortcuts.
That depends on the person, and what their job is. The company IT guy should be able to do things faster than I can (or else I wouldn’t have called IT in the first place) and shortcuts are part of that. If it’s my retired construction worker of a father, there’s no way he was ever going to know the hundreds of windows keyboard shortcuts that the OS does a terrible job of letting anyone know that they actually exist.
watching my boss shut down the front desk computer at EOD:
“you know, instead of clicking the X on 5 windows, you can hit ctrl+shift+Q once and save all that wasted time clicking. AND it saves me time tomorrow by opening all the windows at once, instead of only the last one you closed”
“oh, thanks! you know all the time-savers”
next day:
back to clicking every X
Does ctrl+shift+Q close all the windows?
well now I want a megathread of all the best shortcuts.
control shift T reopens your last closed browser tab/window, it can be spammed
middle clicking a link opens it in a new tab (works even on steam! great for comparing games or continual browsing without resetting your scrolling progress during sales)
Ctrl+click does the same thing middle clicking does, it’s for those who have cheap mouses with wheel not working after a month of usage
Or some trackballs. Not that I would know.
edit: Though in my experience Ctrl+click is middle click? Maybe it’s a Windows/Linux thing?
Not exactly, ctrl+click is opening separate tab from clicking on link as middle click does, other functionality is not confirmed and yes, it might be windows/Linux thing as i didn’t tried other PC OS
Ah, sorry. I thought we were talking about general functionality, not specific to the browser or tab functionality. Thanks for following up!
Windows arrow keys snaps windows and moves them
Windows L locks your computer
Windows V brings up the clipboard history
That clipboard history can get you into trouble if you’re not careful….
Leaving anything on the clipboard even with history off can get you into trouble if you’re not careful.
Using clipboard at all can get you into trouble if there is a malware that checks them
It can also get you out of trouble if you needed a screenshot or copied text and you accidentally put something higher in the clipboard history. Source: it’s helped me get out of trouble a lot.
double click +drag selects entire words–no more trying to precisely aim the mouse to leave out a period
triple click + drag selects entire paragraphs
in some cases you can select text and just drag it elsewhere, eliminates the need for copy & paste
ctrl + shift + esc = task manager
winkey + m = minimize everything
Ctrl+shift and L/R arrow keys also selects entire words, and up/down selects entire rows. No more taking your hands off the keyboard to select text!
My favorite that I can’t believe not everyone uses is ctrl+backspace to delete a whole word at once. Totally butchered typing something? Start over quickly. Need to delete most of your sentence? Delete it in just a few taps.
tripple click is also a solid podcast on game news and stuff.
On Windows, Win+X, then R, then R again shuts down your Computer
win X, U, U for shut down
win X, U, R for restart
It’s really wild that so many comments in this thread are mocking naive or inneficient ways of doing stuff, without actually giving any info on how to do things better. Or worse, people are spouting niche keyboard shortcuts without giving the context they’re used in, or what those shortcuts even do.
I only just realized that EOD in this context meant “End of day”. Thought this was a highly-trained bomb tech who couldn’t integrate new information into their process.
Or you could just click shutdown without closing any browser windows, safe in the knowledge that they would all load back in whenever you open your browser next?
yea, i’ve tried telling her that. absolute refusal to shut down the PC without closing the browser first. i don’t know why some people can’t move beyond that decades-old advice
How do you open all those windows at once?
You can restore your previous browsing session from the history menu in Firefox. It’ll bring up multiple windows and their tabs.
Oh, I thought this was about program windows. Not Firefox tabs.
I’m making some guesses here that it’s about a browser (and that it’s a browser with a feature to restore previous sessions) but it seems to fit.
Edit: Cut
Edit: Paste (back in same spot so you don’t use the original)
Start Menu: Microsoft PowerPoint
File:New Slide Show
New Slide
Edit: Paste
File: Save: Presentation943.ppt
File:Print
Printer: Microsoft Print to PDF
Save: Presentation943.pdf
Start Menu: Microsoft Edge
Bing Search:Google.com
Google.com search:Yahoo Mail
New email
To:chiliedogg
Subject: link
Message Text:
C:\Users\Windows\Jimmy\Desktop\Presentation943.pdf
/wrists
That’s brilliantly told.
I am a little proud of the little details
But only a little, right?
There has to be some shame for knowing how to do something so stupidly.
Murder she wrote
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why are you moving the fucking mouse for this?
my sister’s boyfriend leaves his keyboard,
moves his mouse to the + icon
clicks to make a new tab
moves his mouse to the search bar
clicks the search bar
moves his hand back to the keyboard
then starts typingIt’s so painful to watch. He is making progress though! We made him get a sticky note haha
Update: I quizzed him on how to do it the fast way and he said “It’s not control + T… or is it…? 😅” He did eventually lock in his answer on control + T being correct so congrats Alex 🥳
I had an old friend that would type www.google.com in the Google search bar, click the top link, then search.
omg I thought that was just a meme
I think most people do it that way, hell I use Vim and tiling window managers and I still do it that way most of the time.
I’ll be honest, I forgot there was a + button to make a new tab. Now I wanna get rid of it, that’s space that I could put more tabs.
REAL
I forgot where that button is because when I need a tab, I just open a random link on the page that I am on in a new tab and go where I need from there
You can also middle mouse click in the empty spaces next to the tabs
I want to see a Blender expert using it with no keyboard shortcuts. I think you can’t even use some functionality like panning without a keyboard. Unless you bind it to extra mouse buttons or smth of course.
The number of people I blow away with Win+X [task manager / device manager / system properties / powershell]…
I’m a ninja. I slide my hand over and thumb/index/key and the required window magically opens.
Even win+X/U/U for shutdown trolling.
Go on a older person’s phone. Whenever I have to do anything on my mom’s phone, it gives me a headache. Everything is too bright and big and unorganized and has so man notifications! And her phone is much newer than mine and it’s still hard for me.
My mom refuses to turn off notifications from apps so there are constantly 30-40 notifications. Making it completely unusable.
I just don’t get it, you can control how your phone works but people act like they can’t do a thing
“no don’t change anything, you’ll break it! i like it how it is”
My mom just got a smart phone for the first time this year, but thankfully she has no interest in using it as anything but a phone
Seeing people with respectable typing speed using just their two index fingers. What a waste. They could have been great.
Your words do not hurt me, I’m already used to being a diappointment.
The fingers aren’t the bottleneck, it’s the brain. I type just as fast with two fingers as with ten.
That’d be me! Over 90 wpm with mostly my index fingers. I do use other fingers for some keys (I always hit space with my thumb and backspace with my ring finger), but it’s mostly index fingers.
Same. I imagine, for me at least, it’s due to having deal with unendingly different keyboard models and not being in front of a terminal all day.
I can however type relatively quickly with either my left or right hand and with the keyboard facing me or sideways. It’s a skill that’s really useful when helping someone out with an issue they’re facing. (I prefer being at their side over remote, as I can gauge what they do and don’t understand better)
People that learned on manual typewriters will do this.
I (my parents) had a computer when I was 5 and didn’t learn to type properly until I took a typing class on manual typewriters in middle school because computer games don’t teach you to type and we didn’t have the internet
Ah yes, my dad mastered the 2-finger-search-system
Cue Sean Connery in Finding Forester typing a full page with two index fingers like a boss.
I try not to judge people…unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.
Yeah, who wouldn’t use the toolbar icons?!
I…
Fuck you, man!
If your hand is already on the mouse, it can be quicker to just right click and click copy. Especially if the next action also uses the mouse.
Do you hold the mouse with both hands?
No, the other hand is scratching my balls
No, but I’ve been using Dvorak long enough to have forgotten how convenient the default cut/copy/paste binds are [on qwerty] without stopping to think about it. Dvorak’s x, c, and v are where qwerty’s b, i, and period are, respectively.
I still use the keybinds more often than right click, but it’s not always the optimal option. With qwerty, it might be always optimal.
Edit: clarity (marked with square brackets)
Based dvorak enjoyer
well as a Colemak enjoyer I don’t have that problem. Couldn’t you just rebind the shortcuts in your OS to be in the normal spot near ctrl?
I’m not sure there is a way to rebind those keyboard shortcuts, at least in Windows, since I believe they are all handled in the current program’s Windows message handler as key inputs rather than cut/copy/paste events. So, afaik, it would need to be set up on a per program basis with that program’s support.
There might be a utility that does that remapping on a key by key basis, but I figure such an app might not work as well with games that use ctrl as a modifier key but not for cut/copy/paste.
For Linux, most of the work I do there is via the terminal which doesn’t even have the usual ctrl key combos for those operations (like ctrl+c is SIGTERM instead of copy).
If I’m doing something that is heavy on copy/paste and mouse use, middle click paste covers a lot and for what it doesn’t, I can move my left hand to hit the qwerty period or I buttons on the right side of the keyboard, so this issue hasn’t been enough of a problem for me to seek out a better solution. I’ve also got a two button switch keyboard layouts shortcut so I could just switch it to qwerty for that and switch back easy enough.
Though I did use to rebind those shortcuts in word and the like when qwerty habits were fresher in my mind. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure when it was that I “unlearned” those shortcuts.
I had someone send me bullet points in Teams… except they weren’t bullet points or even carriage returns. It was just 50+ spaces at the end of the line to make the text go down to the next line in her view.
She was also a right-click copy/paster.
You’ve got me questioning my life choices
Shift+ins gang
Button2 and while pressed, button3 to snarf.
Middle click paste ftw.
But on the flip side. If you tell somebody something they don’t know like:
‘You can open links in new tabs by klicking on them with the mouse wheel.’
Or
‘You can reopen closed tabs by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T’
They look at you like you’ve just shown them the meaning of life. Bonus points if you see them using it later.
You can what?!
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When I’m in the passenger seat, I push on the imaginary brake. When I’m watching someone on a computer, I’m pushing shortcuts on the imaginary keyboard.
Watching somebody scroll to the bottom of a very long list by clicking the arrow button under the scrollbar is my idea of hell.
do those arrows still exist?
Yeah, sometimes. I think Win11 fucks with scroll bars so they might be a line there.
there is a reason i use i3wm on linux.
You cannot use my computer, it is impossible.
I could unless your i3 config is atypical
good news for you, i use mostly stock binds for navigation, the defaults are always the best, and a few extraneous ones for launching applications and configuration and such.
this person dotfiles.
Part of the reason I installed Arch (BTW) is to see the looks of confusion and concern on my family’s faces as I’m computationizing
it’s definitely a benefit. It’s always fun showing people how nicely you can navigate and how cleanly you can configure things.
I have never installed pure arch. I like endeavor OS.
Do you game? If so, how is it with tiling?
yeah, play minecraft and factorio mostly, it’s great. Opening a game in bordered with another window is a little goofy sometimes, but you can set that workspace to be stacking/tabbed instead of splitting, and that solves that problem, you can also just make it open in fullscreen if you want though. One of the really nice things is since it’s a WM dealing with any sort of fullscreen operations are going to be pretty substantially simplified.
I have had a few weird input issues but that might be my config, i haven’t gone through it incredibly tediously. I can highly recommend at least trying a WM if you haven’t before, i3wm is quite nice as it’s extremely minimal but mostly configured out of the box, you’ll need ot do some minor config but other than that it’s usable once installed.
I tried Manjaro with sway, but had a few deal breaker issue, such as sound not working at all.
I just installed i3 on my personal pc and it works straight out of the box, which is a better experience already than Sway.
So I will see how I like it. I bought a 48" monitor specifically to act as a bezel-less dual/quad monitor, so a WM felt like it was a no brainer.
if you like i3 you should check out qtile. it’s written in python and has good documentation.
I am just getting started with i3. I think the issue was more with Manjaro Sway.
It’s been a few days now without any issues on Linux Mint. I haven’t done anything complicated yet, but it feels natural to open and move windows around, which is a great start.
And the sound works too. So that’s good.
WMs tend to be like that sometimes, they usually require some form of configuration, like sound, and more general system management, theming, etc. But if you’re familiar with all of that, it’s trivial enough to setup and get working.
Ironically i3wm is intended for multi monitor operation, i’m unsure if you can do virtual monitors, though idk if software limits that at all, you might be able to do that natively lol. I’ve been using i3 with 3 monitors for a while, it’s super nice. Basically exactly what i wanted for my setup.
the factory must grow
THE FACTORY MUST GROW
ah, the feels of keyboard(mostly)only navigation.
bonus points to get someone to quit vim.
it’s so nice, the best invention ever. The worst as floating WMs. Terrible idea.
Anyway i quit vim, to use nvim instead :)
Every single time anybody has had to take remote control of a work computer while I watch feels like a violation and/or some sort of supernatural haunting.
Looking over someone’s shoulder while they clearly engage the interface wrong I have a much easier time doing. It’s the disembodied element that gets me.
Watching my mom do anything on the computer is a true exercise of patience. She found something neat on the internet? Open LibreOffice Writer, copy-paste the article title. Funny picture? Copy-paste it to that same doc. Youtube video? Copy-paste the video title to the doc.
She complained more than once that she couldn’t find those things some time later. I told her not to rely on titles, especially on Youtube, and to save the whole address instead. Of course, she ignored me and still saves titles and pictures in a .doc
Inputs login, grabs the mouse, clicks on the password field, inputs password, grabs the mouse again and clicks OK
With the way sites work these days there’s always some pop-up asking you to rate your experience or some crap. Especially Microsoft admin sites.
I start typing and then that pops up and then I click it away and the freaking focus is taking off of the text field… Now I got to click back in there and type again
If anyone here works at Microsoft please please stop with the fucking pop-ups inside of your own administrator sites. I do not want to rate your site, I do not want to learn about all the little changes you made for no good reason. I want to get my fucking work done
i am okay with this during the few instances where they do things in a better way than i would have. like utilizing some extremely rare/custom keybinds for certain tasks in IDEs. those experiences are eye opening and humbling.
most of the other times though, yeah it’s pretty rough
This is how I learned about alt+drag and middle click in many common DEs.
This is how I learned about alt+drag and middle click in many common DEs.
Excellent! If you can incorporate them into your workflow, you may find your efficiency mildly enhanced, as I did.
What do those do?
In Windows, nothing. In Linux, if your DE supports it, you can hold down the Alt key and click anywhere to drag it, rather than using the title bar.
For middle click pasting: normally, to copy and paste text, you’d have to use Ctrl+c,Ctrl+v (or equivalent methods). Again, if your setup supports it, instead you can just highlight text, then middle click elsewhere to paste the highlighted text.
Oh I already knew about the alt one. I thought you were talking about IDEs lol. Was very sleep deprived when I read this the first time.
I like the middle click one. I knew you could use it to paste, but not copy.
When I made my comment, I was worried that “DE” would be interpreted as a typo … But not enough to expand it.
