Function keys productivity trick • Hacker News Board

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#211

Post by deafpolygon » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 10:45 AM UTC

HomeLine wrote: post #157

teo_zero wrote: post #125

I couldn't disagree more. My mental sanity depends on some fixed beliefs. One of those is that every key sequence not involving the Win key is sent to and handled by the application in focus. Including F-keys, which many applications expect, in any case. Ex: F2=edit cell, F9=recalculate in Excel. Global actions handled by the SO or DE must involve Win. Ex: Win+L lock screen. And yes, Redmond-imposed Alt-Tab is an abo…

Bingo. I’d like to add two parts: 1. Alt-Tab also works to select which Excel file you want in focus. I often have 10+ Excel files open and choose what I need with Alt-Tab-Arrow. 2. I can open all apps fast using Windows+Text. For example, Excel opens if I hit the Windows Key then “exc”, Chrome opens if I hit the Windows Key then “chr”, etc. Mac users can do the same by replacing the Windows Key with Command + Space.…

You mean downside?

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#212

Post by I_complete_me » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 11:41 AM UTC

deafpolygon wrote: post #210

I_complete_me wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe checkout https://vickychijwani.me/blazing-fast-application-switching-... . Personally I use jumpapp which does more or less the same thing. https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp .

I meant for example, if I hit Meta+o then I could press any single key after that.. i.e. 't' for terminal, 'f' for file manager, 'b' for browser. KDE doesn't support that, as far as I know.. nothing built in, anyways.

True nothing fully built in. With jumpapp installed though and adding Custom Shortcuts, I have the following:

    Alt  B --> Browser (eg Firefox)

    Alt  K --> Konsole

    Alt  T --> Thunderbird

    Alt Z --> zim

    Alt D --> doom

jumpapp will open the app if it is not open and switch to it if it is open. It's way to handy to forgo IMHO. But jumpapp is a dependency, true.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#213

Post by reportgunner » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:08 PM UTC

You can use Win+[number on the row key] on Windows to do this, no configuration required. The number corresponds to the position of an app on the taskbar. You can pin apps to the task bar to make sure they are always in the same position.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#214

Post by reportgunner » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

downboots wrote: post #195

hbn wrote: post #9

Can people hit their function keys without looking at the keyboard? Sure, hitting F5 to go to your terminal is less keystrokes than e.g. Cmd+tab+tab, but I can't hit anything in the function row without glancing down at my keyboard. And I put a lot of value in looking at my keyboard as little as possible

at the risk of ruining a perfect keyboard you may super glue some tactile feedback

It's not really a perfect keyboard if you need to super glue something to it.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#215

Post by motoboi » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

soufron wrote: post #164

motoboi wrote: post #149

In macOS, just CMD- ,t-e will give me a terminal. So many keys, you say. Well, it takes me probably 1/10 the time to hit fn-F1. Also, no extra app, Chrome is just CMD- ,c-h .

Nope, it's not the same. It's definitely faster and smoother to use only one key.

I swear for god that its faster for me. Muscle memory maybe?

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#216

Post by HomeLine » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

deafpolygon wrote: post #211

HomeLine wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. I’d like to add two parts: 1. Alt-Tab also works to select which Excel file you want in focus. I often have 10+ Excel files open and choose what I need with Alt-Tab-Arrow. 2. I can open all apps fast using Windows+Text. For example, Excel opens if I hit the Windows Key then “exc”, Chrome opens if I hit the Windows Key then “chr”, etc. Mac users can do the same by replacing the Windows Key with Command + Space.…

You mean downside?

I see no upside to the suggestions laid out in the article.

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#217

Post by williamdclt » Thu, Jan 05, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #188

williamdclt wrote: post #91

I can't hit Fn keys reliably without looking. Instead I mapped switching to my common programs to `fn+h/j/k/l` and other closeby keys (firefox = fn+h, vscode = fn+j, etc). My right-hand fingers are already on hjkl anyway, it's much much faster for me :)

Proper keyboards group in clusters F1–F4, F5–F8, F9–F12, with gaps between them. Unfortunately, this practice is regularly disregarded (even though uniformity is obviously a terrible idea), and particularly uncommon on laptop keyboards.

I probably still wouldn't be able to hit them accurately, I'm not a great typist :) fn+h/j/k/l isn't mapped to anything, these keys are much more accessible and switching windows is probably the thing I do most, so it seems to make sense to me

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#218

Post by swah » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 11:22 AM UTC

duderific wrote: post #162

swah wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this set-up but after alt-tabbing for 20 years its kinda hard to stop.

I haven't ever noticed a productivity hit from alt-tabbing. Many of the devs I work with use Spaces and the three-finger slide to move between apps. However this doesn't work if you're not using the trackpad or Magic Mouse. Additionally, since I'm usually just moving between a few apps (VSCode, terminal, browser, Teams) it's usually pretty easy to just alt-tab or alt-tab-tab with no loss of context.

Me too - I just think that its a main factor of my left wrist pain because one does it maybe a thousand times per day...

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#219

Post by pigcat » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #46

trumpeta wrote: post #5

Another way of doing this is assign Hyper key to Caps Lock with Karabiner and then use that to set up hyper+X shortcuts to different or macros using Hammerspoon. So e.g. I have hyper+a for Alacritty, hyper+b for Browser etc.

You can also make your Spacebar (with a tiny delay not to interfere with typing) an app-launcher key, and then you don't even need to move your poor pinky for such frequent space+r for browser space+f for file manager, etc.

Can you please elaborate? How does this not interfere with typing?

Re: Function keys productivity trick

#220

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

In the discussion of standards, standardisation, and reserving specific keystrokes for specific contexts (applications, OS / windowing system, increasing Web browser (an increasingly inadequate description), etc., we have ... an embarrassment of riches. Or something like that.

The first standardisation within a GUI context I'm aware of was the Common User Access system on IBM PCs. That grew out of the early PC era within which different programs had their own idiosyncratic command-key conventions, several of which are listed in the Wikipedia article on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access>

This still wasn't the first such standard. IBM already had fairly standardised function-key conventions under MVS and TSO/ISPF. The Unix world inherited emacs functions from ITS (as a set of macros over the TECO editor), vi keybindings, and a number of other conventions. Emacs commands have been incorporated into Readline, and are generally available on bash and similar shells.

There was a revision of CUA under Windows (whose name / initialism I forget), as well as a set of interface guidelines for Apple's classic Macintosh, as well as MacOS / OS X). Within the Linux world, GNOME and KDE offer the HIG, Human Interface Guidelines.

And various X11 window managers offer their own shortcuts and hotkeys (I've long used and extended a set for WindowMaker, for my own use, which incorporate some of the ideas in the submitted article).

There's also the browser environment, in which there are often conflicts: browser-versus-OS (window manager / GUI shell), browser-versus-webapps (e.g., a site's own specific keybindings), and browser-versus-extensions, such as, say, Vimperator, which provides a vi/vim-like keybinding interface to major browsers.

A key problem is that once a standard does emerge, interface conventions change, often profoundly. And independent evolved systems (e.g., Emacs, VIM, CUA, MS Windows, Apple Mac, ...) have a rather stubborn persistence measured in decades. Moving from mainframes to minis to PCs to GUIs and over the past decade to both mobile/touch- and Web-based applications, and arguably voice-based (Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, ...) are further confounding standards. Given that the user-base of smartphones / tablets is now roughly 10x that of desktop-based systems, design principles for smartphones seem to be driving desktop conventions, regardless of suitedness to task.