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Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

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Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#101

There's a financial modeling in Excel competition held each year that awards a golden keyboard without an F1 key to the winner.

I guess there's a niche for everything: https://www.modeloff.com/modeloff-golden-keyboard/

(slightly larger photo of the golden keyboard: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CULeDw8XIAAo0-U.png )

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#102
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the worse if you're used to readline / emacs keybindings, where ^W is "delete word". Editing a Web form and suddenly having the entire tab disappear is less than gruntling.

There are dozens of us! Firefox at least lets you set the shortcut key to Meta instead of Control.

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#103
Firefox on Linux has a similar issue. A very common shortcut Ctrl-W is right next to Ctrl-Q, which completely closes the application, and there's no built-in way to turn it off! Which makes the software completely unusable unless you install a separate plugin that disables Ctrl-Q shortcut. It's really amazing that Mozilla doesn't think this is a bug.

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#104

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...

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.

My stylesheet is here; you can install it with the Stylish browser extension: https://gist.github.com/oxguy3/3338da5c38348c2a6e72

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#105
post #30

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

If you're able to build Chromium yourself, here's a trivial patch which does just that (only tested on Linux):

https://gist.github.com/blockoperation/5ec91d666e670e39584d2...

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#106

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. 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…

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.

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#107
post #2

This should really be solved in software... 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...

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.)

[1] https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#108
post #2

This should really be solved in software... 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...

> This should really be solved in software And this software is called "Excel". This should really be solved in software called "Excel". As in: remove functionality from F1

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.

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#109
post #103

Firefox on Linux has a similar issue. A very common shortcut Ctrl-W is right next to Ctrl-Q, which completely closes the application, and there's no built-in way to turn it off! Which makes the software completely unusable unless you install a separate plugin that disables Ctrl-Q shortcut. It's really amazing that Mozilla doesn't think this is a bug.

For a similar solution to the one in the article here for your problem: Some "gamer keyboards" have an extra bump on W (similar to but often distinct from the home row bumps for J and F) for the importance of WASD to games. You could invest in one of those or emulate it with a bit of tape or something.

Re: Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

#110

I don't use Excel very often and I need my F1 key for other tools, but I've had capslock removed for years.

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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