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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.
why are you moving the fucking mouse for this?
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.
BECAUSE I HAVE ADHD AND CAN’T REMEMBER THEM TO SAVE MY LIFE
DUDE IT’S CALLED A STICKY NOTE
But honestly if you’re happy with your current workflow then that’s fair
SO MANY STICKY NOTES
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You don’t use keyboard shortcuts because you have ADHD and can’t remember them
I use keyboard shortcuts because I have ADHD and would never be able to stay focused on anything without them
We are not the same
Every 0.04 seconds I shave off whatever task I’m doing is a hit of dopamine right to the receptors
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
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 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’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.
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
REAL
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 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
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”
I had to teach my little brother how to download a exe yesterday. Like just the simple every software or game type of installation:
click download on website -> click windows version on GitHub list -> extract folder -> find exe
Quite honestly im impressed he’s been using a computer for like 4 years without ever encountering a .zip fileAnd don’t get me started with my highschool teachers. One of them got SUPER excited because I showed her how to enable looping on a YouTube video because she kept clicking replay every 3 minutes when the song ended (she plays Spanish music before class starts)
TBF if you’re young, so much software just comes through software managers or super easy installers. Steam + Windows store is probably enough for most people. Maybe? Idk, I have no idea what’s on the Windows store except Minecraft.
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.
Over the years I’ve become accustomed to a highly customised, privacy centric, keyboard-driven workflow that makes heavy use of tiling and modality.
I’m also “the technical one” in my family and friend group…
So when people sit me down in front of their bloated, ad-powered, AI “enhanced,” stock laptops, and ask me to, essentially spend an hour learning about an obscure Windows problem space, then debugging and implementing the fix, I don’t blame them for not realising the pain they cause me.
there are benefits to being a technically advanced computer user:
- you can learn how to use linux.
- once you know how to use linux, you can stop fixing everyone elses problems for them.
once you know how to use linux, you can stop fixing everyone elses problems for them.
I know you meant being able to claim “I don’t use Windows” but just installing Linux has massively lowered the tech support requests I get from my parents.
yeah, installing and configuring linux for other people seems to be getting more and more popular these days. My dad now runs linux on an older thinkpad, he likes it, doesn’t ask for login or any weird shenanigans, just does spreadsheets pretty much exclusively. Works great.
It’s a shame how annoying most modern operating systems are these days.
What’s a good parent distro in your opinion? I’ve been eyeing Mint since that’s how I started
personally i’m a fan of the non-based distros, or root distros, arch and debian, both are pretty good, debian has really impressed me with it’s reliability and stability so far. Though it’s a bit old in terms of software so that’s unfortunate. Arch is nice because it’s bleeding edge, so there are always thing ready for you to be messing with, and it’s minimal enough that it mostly gets out of your way, and lets you do what you want, which is nice.
I’ve heard that people really like nixos, if you have the mental capacity to deal with it’s learning curve that is. Otherwise i know some people like fedora, though it’s a bit too spicy for me personally, comes out of the box with basically everything pre configured, i’m just not a huge fan of that.
Mint is really nice if you just need a “works” distro. Ubuntu is still pretty good? Though snaps and what not are a bit annoying. Outside of that i’m not super familiar with anything else.
Yeah I like the idea of an “starter” distros for parents, but then rolling packages would probably be easier for when I need to do tech support
rolling distros are a bit of a pain from time to time, notably if you get a broken package, although i hear fedora is really good in terms of being updated, and also stable, so maybe that’s the ticket. Personally i don’t mind things being out of date, since most of the stuff i host is either externally installed, or stable enough its not going to get significant feature updates anyway.
sadly, I have a knack of helping people so as much as i know linux (using windows 11 right now because better battery life on laptops last time i checked) I will help someone with windows/mac.
have you tried not interacting with people? Seems to work well for me.
Try explaining this to your family.
they wouldn’t listen to me anyway lol.
About 10 years ago, I told everyone I helped that I either installed Linux or they were on their own. And I was never going to physically hold an iPhone unless it was to free them up to go find a hammer.
I had to watch someone use emacs today.
did they have a foot pedal?
I told them to run
git rebase -i, and they never configured their$EDITORor their git editor, so it opened in vim and I had to intervene.
You never quit Emacs. You just… die…
Lucky!
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.
Select text -> Edit menu -> Copy, click elsewhere -> Edit menu -> Paste 🤮
Not knowing Ctrl+shift+esc opens the task manager is one thing, but copy and paste should be taught in school.
Ctrl+shift+esc was so useful back when I learned it. I still see people press ctrl+alt+del and click to open task manager. Or alternatively (but not as bad imo) right clicking on the start button and selecting to open task manager
Win+X opens the same menu.
It doesn’t physically interrupt the system like ctrl alt delete does.
right clicking on the start button and selecting to open task manager
TIL
My lazy ass sometimes doesn’t feel like moving the left hand so I just use the mouse.
Valid
I used to know this shortcut, but it was one of the many that I forgot after moving to linux.
Thanks for the refresher! I’ll probably get use of this on my work laptop
The best shortcut like that is win+X it opens a quick menu with stuff like Powershell, task manager, device manager, and a bunch of other admin stuff.
You can also right click the window icon to open the menu.
I right click the start menu more than I open it normally.
Wut. 😮
Thank you for this.
I still haven’t grown out of my ctrl + alt + del habit
I was going to say why is that even there, but it reminded me of a very useful macOS tip:
You can access all the menu bar items that don’t have hot keys without leaving the keyboard.
Command+shift+question mark opens the help menu search bar and you can type in ANY menu bar item by name and press enter to do it. It will also show any keyboard shortcuts.
Ctrl+F2 selects the menu bar so you can use arrow keys, but that’s slower.
As an avid vim/terminal user, macOS accessibility shortcuts are friggen amazing.
Oh that sounds really nice. I’m personally extremely annoyed that their shortcuts differ wildly from Windows and Linux shortcuts but at least this thing is some consolation.
Ooooh thanks! I’ll use that a lot.
Now I can’t stop picturing a nightmare scenario of having to watch someone do their copy/paste purely from the keyboard, but using the menus via that trick, rather than using the hotkeys. Thanks for that.
I wouldn’t have to paste via menu if “paste without formatting” didn’t require the fingers of a pianist.
Paste Without Formatting exists on the right-click context menu almost everywhere. I don’t consider context menu usage to be annoying (to observe someone using) at all, personally.
But why use mouse when keyboard works?
Isn’t there a ctr+shift+v equivalent?
Yes, mostly it’s command instead of Ctrl
But some permutations of paste without formatting/paste values only/paste format only end up using 4 keys which is always awkward to do.
People like this have lost ctrl of their lives.
now imagine being a heavy duty vim user and your coworker ssh’s into a machine, opens up vim, and eventually closes it by writing all their changes and then backgrounding the process, and then rebooting the machine
Closing vim is like landing a plane: anytime you can walk away unscathed it’s a success.
Um have you ever tried to debug something over a zoom call on a *nix shell cli? This person’s nightmare is my Tuesday morning before I get coffee.
Watching anyone else’s terminal flow is my personal hell.
But then when you do find someone else who gets it and you start swapping runcoms it’s like the most beautiful thing.
It’s like when I log in to a vnc session and see a bunch of nano commands in the history, I just know my day is gonna be fucked.
Try sitting as a passenger while your friend takes your car for a spin.
yep, not using scroll wheel but clicking on the up/down arrow in the side bar, or, especially in Windows, when the remote IT guy go through start menu and type “control panel” and go here and here and here and you are wondering how this guy knows so few?!?
I love Satisfactory but scrolling through a longer list of items can be a real pain. Scrolling with the mouse wheel feels incredibly slow and clicking the wheel once and then moving the the cursor down simply isn’t an option
So I’m often forced to resort to dragging the scroll bar manually, just like people in medieval times did
Having done remote support in the past, there is often a delay and especially with scrolling it is difficult to control, so I always ended up doing the side bar thing as well.
Control panel is also a quirky one, because it is sorted alphabetically from left to right and then from top to bottom in the display language. So the control panel items are very often in a different place because Microsoft.
I did learn most of the control panel shortcuts because of that though, which still comes in handy sometimes. I even had a printed out cheat sheet for it.
I don’t think the up/down arrows on the scroll-bars event exists anymore. They aren’t there in default windows 11 that’s for sure.
Edit: they do appear when you hoover your mouse over the scroll-bar or click on it.
when you hoover your mouse
pls, do not hoover your mouse
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 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
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.
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.
Does ctrl+shift+Q close all the windows?
well now I want a megathread of all the best shortcuts.
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
tripple click is also a solid podcast on game news and stuff.
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.
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….
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.
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
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!
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
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
Worst I had was guiding someone through some install process in bash. They didn’t know how to use Tab. And made a lot of typos of course. And spoke in an accent heavily different from mine.
Those are the times you have to mute yourself while watching…
There’s an application we use at work that I used to be an admin for at a previous job so I know all of the keyboard shortcuts, watching people use a mouse for navigation makes my skin crawl but I’ve been teaching some of my coworkers so it’s getting better.
Ugh it’s the worst. Every time I remotely connect with Social Security support, there’s always such a delay while they click around. Thankfully they help me understand how many viruses I have by running some weird command called Net Stat or something idk. I see the screen flash and it’s scary. They’re even so helpful that they even help me login to my bank and transfer funds to get rid of the net viruses! I only wish they would scroll the mouse instead of clicking on the arrow bars. They’re helpful, but man do I hate when they yell and curse at me when I don’t have money and can’t pay them until next week. But I guess it’s worth the small computer struggles, but boy does it bother me when they don’t scroll the mouse wheel!
I’ve dealt with that and found a solution. What’s your SSN?
Oh fantastic! I didn’t expect to find you guys on the mouse Reddit version, whatever it is I’m using here to share my success story!
I’m scared someone will attack me, so I can tweet it instead with that cool encryption thing that Elon talked about. I’ll try it now.
@tweet send Okay we’re safe here, no one can see it except you and me. Thanks for the help, I don’t know if the hackers can see my stuff. But if I cover my webcam while I type this I think we’re good. My social security number is 155-21-3249. I think I already sent the last payment, so if I need to get you a new Google robot gift card or whatever it’s called, I can try to go to target. I get paid Friday, is that okay?
