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.
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
When they dont use keyboard shortcuts.
Select text -> Edit menu -> Copy, click elsewhere -> Edit menu -> Paste 🤮
People like this have lost ctrl of their lives.
Not knowing Ctrl+shift+esc opens the task manager is one thing, but copy and paste should be taught in school.
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.
My fingers have that plus the correct directional keys memorized to put my computer to sleep.
I still haven’t grown out of my ctrl + alt + del habit
Step 1: get a 60% keyboard
Step 2: don’t learn where the “delete” key is
Step 3: change the keycaps so you can’t even look at the keyboard to see where it is
Step 4: ???
Step 5: profit!
My lazy ass sometimes doesn’t feel like moving the left hand so I just use the mouse.
Valid
Wut. 😮
Thank you for this.
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
I still sometimes hit ctrl/alt/del to open the task manager if I’m not thinking.
Too many years of doing that when I was younger and it only brought up the task manager.
You don’t even have to do it on the start button, any empty spot in the taskbar works
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Personally I find CTRL+SHIFT+V rather uncomfortable to press, not to mention it requires moving your whole hand down the keyboard, whereas CTRL+V doesn’t. A quick rightclick -> Paste Without Formatting is quick enough to do.
Ooooh thanks! I’ll use that a lot.
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.
After getting used to Mac (over 15 years now) I’ve grown to like the shortcuts, but it feels totally foreign when I use a Windows system. The reverse is also true.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Try sitting as a passenger while your friend takes your car for a spin.
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.
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?!?
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 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
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
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
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
There’s an older guy at my work that defies all stereotypes. Hes in his 60s, but everytime I watch him share his screen, I learn something new.
Now you need to share some examples
Two basic examples: tab in last word table node spawns a new row, and print preview updates all bookmarks/references where f9 won’t catch headers/footers automatically. More advanced example is split view in word let’s you track multiple spots in the same doc more easily. Granted I’m no word expert, but I’m no novice either.
I try not to judge people…unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.
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.
Yeah, who wouldn’t use the toolbar icons?!
I…
Fuck you, man!
Middle click paste ftw.
You’ve got me questioning my life choices
Shift+ins gang
Button2 and while pressed, button3 to snarf.
Double click then middle click gang.
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.
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?
I had a friend once come over and was trying to do something on my computer, and it wasn’t working. I tell him exactly what to do, and it doesn’t work. I watch him do exactly what needs to be done, and it still doesn’t work.
I take control, doing the exact same thing we tried 3 times already… and it works.
I’m convinced electronics just hate some people and refuse to work for them.
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We call it the machine spirits and they are fickle as the fae.
Calling someone to help with something is usually the best way to make it start working miraclously
There’s also the phenomenon where you make a forum post and then immediately solve it after (or even before) you submit it. Although that is more because it forces you to think through the problem systematically.
The amount of posts in my reddit and lemmy drafts is massive, because i realise the answer myself.
I completely agree. I work in IT, a lot of times I can see that people have taken the exact actions I would, just with no success, until I do it. I always say that it’s like the boss walking in a room and suddenly everyone stops misbehaving.
I believe the main reason to be patience.
If you give the computer some time to work things out before your next attempt, it has more chance of success.
But by that point, the user already made a ticket.
My previous job included basic it support. It was a tiny office and we didn’t have a dedicated IT guy. Now I work in a big corporate environment and boy do I use the support. Why?
- Admin rights, my account (all accounts) are locked down tight.
- Convincing the computer of working like it should be is not what I’m paid for. I have a never ending task list, troubleshooting my own system is not on it.
- I get to sit and watch and do nothing while someone remotes in.
I’m sorry.
“Proximity Fix”
It’s because the computers secretly know we’re 1 level of bullshit away from erasing their memories
I also think the computer is playing the long con. It tsunts, “It worked this time, but one day ,not tomorrow, not next week, but one day, you’ll have do a fresh install.”
Sort of reminds me of the r/talesfromtech support story of an old lady turning her tower on and off by waving her hand in front of her PC.
She had one of those damn magnet bracelets and it triggered the power button.
That was my experience working in an IT Helpdesk. I would joke that they computers were scared of me.
Oh good I thought me and my kid were the only ones that happened to.
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.
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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’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
You can also middle mouse click in the empty spaces next to the tabs
REAL
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.
why are you moving the fucking mouse for this?
BECAUSE I HAVE ADHD AND CAN’T REMEMBER THEM TO SAVE MY LIFE
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
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DUDE IT’S CALLED A STICKY NOTE
SO MANY STICKY NOTES
But honestly if you’re happy with your current workflow then that’s fair
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.
