Live data from Hacker News

Some Excel users pop F1 off their keyboards (2012)

businessinsider.com

131–140 of 219 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I use it frequently while programming in Vim. Definitely one of my top ten operations.

Uh, yeah, why would you? You can easily delete a word at a time and then type in what you wanted instead.

cw is shorter than dwi?

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

#132
post #85

Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Same goes for answers.microsoft.com, whenever i see that link on top og Google results I'm pretty sure I'll just waste 10 minutes of my life and then search for the same thing on Stackexchange and pray to god som…

Don't know if you noticed, but a few years ago a ton on the on-box help content in Windows got replaced with fwlinks. I'm pretty sure it was because they realized they were spending a ton of money on shipping and localizing content that people would just ignore in favor of search results. Open notepad and look at Help->View Help for an example.

On a side note, this is extremely uncool for people working on non-internet connected machines. It is doubly annoying when you're using the web interface to interact with a device and click help and it 503s because they didn't bother to ship the manual on the device.

Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.

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

#133

Back in my Engineer days, where I'd spend much of my time writing technical reports, I'd always remove the Insert key from my keyboard. It's sitting there in that block of six keys that you use all the time when editing text (home, end, page up/down, delete), and it's a little timebomb. You would invariably hit it by accident at some point and change your editor into "overwrite all my stuff" mode. It would usually ta…

I wrote PSReadline (readline for PowerShell) and never bothered implementing overwrite mode.

It took about 3 years before anyone complained, and I think there is still just the one complaint.

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

#134
post #115

Back in my Engineer days, where I'd spend much of my time writing technical reports, I'd always remove the Insert key from my keyboard. It's sitting there in that block of six keys that you use all the time when editing text (home, end, page up/down, delete), and it's a little timebomb. You would invariably hit it by accident at some point and change your editor into "overwrite all my stuff" mode. It would usually ta…

Agreed — overwrite mode is something I basically never want and am always unhappily surprised to find it's switched on. That's one of the things I like about using C-a, C-e, M-v & C-v, C-d instead of home, end, pgup, pgdn & Del — much less likely to accidentally hit the wrong key. And my hands don't have to fly so far from my keyboard!

Overwrite mode is basically a relic from the old fixed-width record days. We just need to think up a better use for the Insert key so people don't fall back on making it the overwrite toggle.

Maybe in a word processor it could bring up the "put a picture/graph/whatever" right here in this document?

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I use it frequently while programming in Vim. Definitely one of my top ten operations.

Uh, yeah, why would you? You can easily delete a word at a time and then type in what you wanted instead.

All I can think of is adding text into whitespace preceding alignment; but that's not such a common operation (at least not in my daily usage).

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

#136
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.

Surely you're kidding right? I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0. On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.

Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do.

Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing.

With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.

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

#137
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control You must be an emacs heathen. Caps lock gets remapped to ESC.

Control when held in combination with other keys, ESC when tapped by itself.

How can you do that???

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control when held in combination with other keys, ESC when tapped by itself.

How can you do that???

Use Karabiner and the first one here: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/

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

#139
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, yeah, why would you? You can easily delete a word at a time and then type in what you wanted instead.

cw is shorter than dwi?

Well, like anyone with their head screwed on straight, I use emacs and don't know all the vim shortcuts.

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

#140
post #99

In all their wisdom Asus put the power button next to the delete button on my BX410 [0]. Too bad I can't pop that button. Setting it to do nothing is the first thing I do after installing Linux (which I do regularly). [0] https://dlcdnimgs.asus.com/websites/global/products/APfLG1Rk...

But Windows also has that option: "When I press the power button: [Dropdown]", and one of the options is "Do nothing"...
Post reply on HN