1. It’s a bank.
2. Banks lock down their computers.
3. So you cannot install other software to fix this in software.
4. You do not have access to the system low enough to rename / remove the winhelp.exe crap.
5. No 3rd party hardware is allowed in the bank. So no bringing your own keyboard.
All the time we get into this threads on HN where the techie goes well you could just...bla bla bla. In the real would of corporate IT everything you say is a non-starter.
The greater point is that if you put something really useful next to something really annoying it will exacerbate the issue.
F1 should not be so bad, and it should not be so close to F2. Even just leaving alone how bad, and utterly useless, the help dialogues in Windows are it's just terrible UX design.
It would be like having a "eject engine block" button next to the "start car" button. One day you're going to hit it instead of the one you meant... Annoying / dangerous UI controls should be kept out of the way of the more common features.
My favourite example of this is from the Apollo command module. Margaret Hamilton (one of the programmers) had her daughter in the simulator and let her play around. She managed to crash the simulator by launching a certain programme midflight. Margaret wanted to stop this from being possible, but was overruled because astronauts don't make mistakes. Eventually one of the astronauts made that exact mistake during the Apollo 8 flight.
one thing that boggles me about the firefox dev team is their continuing refusal to add a "disable ctrl-Q" setting. it's right next to ctrl-W and in my firefox using days i accidentally hit it a ton of times.
Chrome used to "honor" the backspace key means navigate backwards so much that if you hit tab (changed focus) while typing a textbox then hit backspace it would nav back and lose all your text. Made me cry so many times.
There used to be one such Firefox addon that even made it into the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie) repositories. Unfortunately it was written for the old plugin system and never updated and is now designated as blocking the new Firefox multiprocessing, so I already started looking into Firefox addon programming just to replace it. Somehow I never thought about looking for newer alternatives in the official addon store, where several modern ones seem to exist already, so I'd like to thank you a lot for your suggestion.
With several versions of windows, I learned to hate how close Help was to Run on the start menu. You're about to run cmd or some specific program, and then next thing you know, your computer is crawling to a halt while it attempts to bring up and display the help ui.
Solvable with keyboard shortcuts or creating a shortcut to cmd somewhere else, but still happened enough to be infuriating. In most cases, it was when I was doing work on someone else's computer.
Former banker, and to this day I remove the F1 key from my keyboards because I still use excel heavily. Never really crossed my mind to remove winhelp.exe or anything else. This was a simple solution to a simple problem, didn't need anything more complicated.
And if I ever need to access the help function, I'd just stick a pen in the socket and hit the membrane.
Exactly this. Could not have said it better myself. Even trying to sort this stuff out properly could cost your department millions of pounds due to bureaucracy and incompetent management.
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 someone has answered there in the succinct SO way. God knows how much resources and man hours Microsoft puts into making these things.
I remember back in the days of 98 when in my experience, hitting F1 would trigger the help which would never load rapidly or successfully. My standard operating procedure was to do a hard shutdown. It was so frustrating.
I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.
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.
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.
I really don't understand how a company as big as Microsoft allows something like answers.microsoft.com to exist.
Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice.
The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things.
I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.
AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.
I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..
That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.
> It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things.
Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given.
Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.
The internet has been a thing for quite some time now, like at least 4 os releases? Microsoft could have found the time to redo the help system to suck less.
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.
I've never been helped by nor successfully troubleshot anything with either of those. And I'm baffled why a glorified text document which rarely contains any useful information grinds my beefy gaming computer to a halt.
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.
'Desire lines' in parks are one example. Desire lines are the paths in the grass that get worn down because people use them even though the designer didn't plan for it.
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.
They could have acknowledged that F1 is "help" and really slow / annoying, so putting a much useful function onto F2 was probably a bad idea. They could have put what F2 did onto a different shortcut.
For instance, they could make F2 something that was infrequently useful and unintrusive, then made F3 do what F2 did. So if you mispress, you don't do the even worse F1 thing.
One thing to keep in mind is that some of these shortcut keys predated the modern AT-style keyboard with the function keys across the top. They were introduced way back in the day of the original PC keyboard with function keys in two columns at the left. F1 and F2 were side by side at the top of these columns, and they were very easy to distinguish from each other and hit reliably. F2 was just about the easiest function key for a touch typist to hit.
Again, per the link prior: this standard predates even Office itself. They could have not followed the standard, but then they would have angered users for not following standards used elsewhere in PC applications at the time.
F2 has long been "Rename Object" and F3 has long been "Find" (though Excel in this case doesn't use it for that, but that's another matter). Did IBM do enough user studies at the time? I'm not sure IBM could have found a user study to predict the order of those choices being irritating to Excel users two and half decades later.
Even then, too, the IBM CUA I pointed to was partly synthetic, pulling in commonalities from apps at the time of its writing. Given F2 is nearly universal as "Rename Object" [1], I've got a feeling it predates the IBM CUA by quite a bit in some heavily used applications, but I'm not a historian.
Office never existed in a vacuum, and the function keys have had common meanings for decades. Microsoft used a mix of the IBM CUA guidelines and presumably what they were seeing from the competition (Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc especially for Excel early in its history). If they put the useful function of F2 somewhere else, they would have broken the muscle memory of so many other PC users, even early in Excel's history. If they moved it today there might be riots, some rioting even by the same people removing F1 keys from keyboards.
Damn it, i have had a prominent FOSS DE guy basically claim that users are idiots after studying the results of a usability test of their DE.
For me, in the trenches, it is more that users find their own ways of doing things. And if it works for them it works for them, and we have no business correcting them.
When my dad was doing some UI work back in like the late 70s, maybe early 80s, for call-center workers no one knew how to do UI yet. But he quickly realised that if you put people in a room and asked them for their feedback after using it for 20 minutes, what they told you would become useless when you actually deployed the software. So he pushed to have the software implement recording features like how long a person is on at which page and which page they went to next. I'm surprised more people don't do that even today when it shouldn't be that much of a technical challenge. Just "here's a trial copy of the software: use it for two weeks and come back to us with your data."
Well, I think it matters if you have the knowledge and consent of the participants, whether the data will be used to produce a proprietary profile on the person, whether that data is sold, and if participants are compensated for participating in a market research program.
Agreed. When I worked at a newspaper, my most valuable contributions by far were ones made after spending a day with a reporter, ad designer, etc. and talking with them about their daily routine.
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 take a minute or two of ruining your document before you realized what was happening and spent the next several minutes repairing the damage.
I would go years at a time without ever hitting that key on purpose, so I just kept it in a drawer, in case it ever needed using.
Now, as a developer, there's an Insert in tons of useful keyboard combos, so it needs to stay there. And laptops have ruined that old useful six-key block so it's a lot rarer to hit it by accident.
But it had no business being there. Fifteen years later, I'm still not a friend of that key.
Heh, as you can see from the other comments, I don't know all the vi commands either. Just a few essentials. I'd assumed from the comment you were a vi person and probably knew more vi than me.
I don't use vi for coding, just quick file edits on the console. I was xemacs for a very long time in college and thereafter - to the point of writing elisp to manipulate xml files, but eventually my Java day job pushed me towards a full IDE. Java is kinda unbearable without it.
I still occasionally turn to emacs for a few things I can't get elsewhere (editing binaries, large files, and doing search and replace in a narrowed buffer), but it's no longer my primary editor or mail reader. I may pick it up again for clojure coding, though.
Yeah, I'm a full IDE guy too but if I'm editing something that where that wouldn't make sense it's back to emacs with me. IntelliJ also supports emacs bindings. :)
‘cw’ isn't overwrite, ‘cw’ is change word. ‘R’ is overwrite. I use ‘r’ sometimes, mostly for things like ‘yypfxry’, but I can't remember the last time I used ‘R’.
I vaguely recall using it a few times back in the day to edit things like fixed-format columnar text files. Now that sort of thing is easier with years worth of accumulated knowledge of tools, but I wasn't born with that knowledge.
Before Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, the usual method was Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins (and Shift+Del for cut), so this key did have a lot of use back in the day. These key combinations still work in most Windows software.
In DOS, these combos were used by Borland's Turbo Vision GUI toolkit (and they didn't offer Ctrl+C/V/X as alternatives). So everything written using that - and there was quite a bit, especially once you count LOB apps - had those shortcuts. In particular, all of Borland's own IDEs did, so those of us who learned to code C or Pascal on DOS in that era still got those shortcuts memorized.
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?
>laptops have ruined that old useful six-key block
For what it's worth, my Thinkpad definitely isn't ruined--it has a five key block containing the other keys you mentioned. Insert is over to the right in a four-key row (along with PrtSc, ScrLk, and Pause) that's above F9-F12
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...
In at least one finance company I know of, alternative keyboards are not permitted without getting security's permission. They might not do a very thorough examination, but I can imagine they might disallow a programmable keyboard on the basis of it being too complex to analyze the risks.
The biggest problem with software (on OS side) is than you can't use your custom layout in BIOS, LiveCDs or when you need to type password if your hardware is encrypted.
Another problem is games. I use dvorak and all games use qwerty bindings so you need either to remap keys for each game or start game with QWERTY layout. If you forgot to start it with qwerty you need to restart the game, which is was really frustrating for me. It's even more problematical with online games like League of legends and etc.
I see no problem for this feature to be present on even cheapest keyboards. I picked ergodox just for an examle.
In the context of the article we're talking about a highly specialized office environment, where bios/live boot environments etc. do not happen often. There, a software solution is useful and cheap.
In the more general case, and for those people that do not mind carrying their own keyboard everywhere, you are right. Especially since a keyboard that expensive probably lasts for a long enough time...
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.
No.. The problem cited in the article is: a common operation that is invoked hundreds of times a day is bound to F2. An uncommon operation that breaks the user's flow is bound to F1. Users keep hitting F1 by accident.
The only proper and decent UX in this case is to remove the source of the error. You do that by removing the binding of F1
this is the problem. and it breaks the user's flow because it obscures the work area and can't be instantly dismissed.
there's nothing wrong with putting relatively uncommon actions next to common actions on the keyboard as long as the actions don't break the user's flow.
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.)
There are dozens of us. It's massively disrupting to the state of flow to miss a key by one, and suddenly another window pops up, but there's no text inside. It takes several seconds for the window to compose itself, and several more to close.
I do keep the F1 key somewhere safe, to put back onto the keyboard, for the next keyboard user.
I came here to mention Scroll Lock which normally doesn't do much in Windows applications but I was utterly confused the other day when my Excel started behaving weirdly !
Excel users don't think that way, I guess. Remapping keys requires a registry update on Windows, which many of my windows-at-work friends don't get access to. Even if they did, they might not trust themselves to make registry updates. Popping the key off is easy, secure, and effective.
This may be 90% cargo culting, 10% reality. One of my former co-workers desperately wanted to be perceived as an Excel ninja, and had heard that people who had achieved guru-level Excel mastery would remove their F1 keys, and so one day pried off her F1 key. Meanwhile the person in our office who probably could have written Minecraft in Excel and then built an Excel simulator in Excel Minecraft had a keyboard with a conspicuously intact F1 key.
Same thing happens in programming circles. I am not exempt: All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control, in honor of my Apple II childhood and SunOS pizza box college heritage.
i also remap caps -> ctrl, but have bindings for `fj` & `jf` in insert mode to exit back to normal mode, on the theory that you basically never have to type either of those letter combos (it has come up maybe twice in the five years i've had it set up). and even if you do have to type one of those letter combos, all you have to do is wait for ~half second between keystrokes and it works fine.
Ideally, yes. I don't recall all the details -- I typically run fairly lightweight in terms of vim customizations as I'm often multiple SSH sessions deep, sometimes on systems with vi but no vim (they exist!), so automatic pastetoggle is usually off the table regardless.
This is spot on. My comment on this thread tried to give some background on how the cargo cult part. The experienced Excel users I know also keep the F1 key right on the keyboard and remap it.
well, emacs, or terminal usage in general on a mac with the control key not on edge of keyboard is extremely unergonomic. So yay to control in the right place.
I'm with you; you're talking to a more than twenty-five year user of Emacs here. I do try, however, to be no less circumspect of my own actions than I am of others'.
Is saving my pinkie from cramping worth losing the ability to type on anyone else's keyboard? I'd say so, but there is a cost.
I would guess that PCs in banks are quite locked down, maybe even making it impossible to remap keys.
But everyone can pop some keys from his/her keyboard.
Plus it's a much easier (and fun) office mod than messing around in the settings of all your applications ;)
Correct – even for developers in DMZ networks have a hard time getting to install things they need to work. Many organizations have convoluted processes for requesting admin access to your machine. Even if you do get access it doesn't mean you necessarily can even download things, most have firewalls that block binaries from anything but "trusted" sources (basically white listed domains, so yeah – "trust".) In a few cases, monitoring on machines have raised red flags and I've had to explain after the fact why I've installed or run a particular piece of software, and in some cases got a proverbial wrist slap and things/access reset.
It's all for good reasons I'm sure, but some processes and rules are so opaque and convoluted and arbitrary, plucking keys off a keyboard is much easier.
Source: I've worked as a developer in mostly top tier banks since 2011.
F2 is also rename on a host of Windows applications, including Windows Explorer.
I've popped it off more than once but couldn't get used to not hitting F3 instead of F2.
What I ended up doing was to rename Windows Help (winhlp32.exe at the time) to something else then copy and rename cmd.exe (or command.com, depending on how far back) to "winhlp32.exe". Now when I pressed F1 it would open a command window, much more useful and less intrusive if hit accidentally.
OMG! This is genius!, how have i never thought of this before!
I bet the people removing caps lock, scroll lock, insert etc are doing it because of the "cleaning ladies"! Not because they accidentally hit the keys.
But because in most offices, keyboards are swiped clean daily by cleaning crews and when you arrive each morning you find an assortment of those keys toggled on or off.
(I have even locked my Windows account on occasion due to not noticing a combination of Caps Lock / Num Lock toggled on/off in the morning)
I lock my keyboard away when I leave... I'll sleep better knowing nobody made it off with my 200$ mechanical clacker. As a side bonus I don't get mystery things locked when I arrive the next morning.
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.
Not too different from me accidentally triggering so many undesired things with the MacBook Pro TouchBar. I previously had no idea how many interfaces respond to the Esc key, now I do.
The real problem is slow help popup. Everybody wants to do help in a browser now, so pressing F1 probably means a slow browser launch. (Not sure about this; I use LibreOffice only.)
Just fix Excel so that a second press of F1 makes the help screen go away, even if the browser is still launching.
This is 99% of the way to a correct solution. But I think it would be better if pressing Escape would dismiss the help screen, rather than another press of F1, so that the few people who intent to use help don't accidentally dismiss it.
But nitpicks aside, this is the correct solution, because it captures the core insight: the user should never fear pressing the wrong key. The ultimate irony in violating this rule is when you've conditioned your users that the most dangerous thing they can do is ask for help.
When I was younger and played games, popping out the windows key was typical. At best triggering windows menu meant lost round, but more typically a crashed game or even crashed Windows.
Even today I'm wary of task switching from a game, as it still doesn't seem to be entirely robust
I haven't hosed a windows session yet, and maybe just one game was crashy ever, while task switching for the last two decades. I ran Windows Server though typically.
I remember this not-so-fondly. This wouldn't be a problem for a game that is composited alongside the desktop in a "Windowed" mode, but for a full-screen application it is an "exclusive" application. The Source engine handles this context switch absolutely terribly. Task-switching out of Team Fortress 2 is a stuttery mess, where for around ten seconds it'll just loop the tiny audio buffer it last filled on top of a black screen before anything is usable again.
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).
i remember a similar issue for desktop computers from ~15 years ago, and a keyboard with a helpful shutdown button. i think it was located a bit to the right of F12. from memory windows just started shutting down and there wasn't a way to interrupt it. pretty funny. not something you'd hit often, but possible to hammer accidentally if playing a full screen game that used a bunch of F1-F12 keys.
after hitting this a few times while playing games i levered all of those extra helpful keys out.
I have a Lenovo Flex 10 - the volume rocker is close to the power button and feels the same. Accidentally leave the volume on full, open a youtube video or independent article, accidentally turn off the device. Wake our baby either with the noise or my subsequent swearing at the useless machine.
It suffices to use KeyTweak for Windows, not physically modify the keyboard. For example, I used it to disable the Back/Forward buttons on my ThinkPad.
Why would not they remap F1 to something else, say another F2 if they so like it? The functionality has been at both Linux and Windows for a very long time.
Because popping the key is by far the simplest solution, especially if you won't miss it in any of your usual workflows.
AFAIK remapping it will need Autohotkey or similar, and banks & funds aren't the environment the more welcoming to arbitrary binaries, even if free software.
AFAIK, Windows has never had a built-in way to remap keys. Sure, you can download third-party tools to do it, but that's often a dicey move in a corporate environment where you aren't allowed to install third-party software.
I'm really surprised more keyboards can't do this kind of simple remapping themselves. I used to remap the keys on virtually every machine I worked on, but these days I just bring in my CODE keyboard which does some simple remapping itself (e.g., caps lock -> ctrl).
They are users, users too often think in terms of optimizing what they do, not the tools they use, or learning to optimize things they think are underlying and fixed.
In addition to what other people mention, it's generally a bad idea to take a sloppy input and try to autocorrect it, because it encourage bad habits that will really surprise you the next time the autocorrect doesn't work as you expect. This ranges from autocorrecting spelling, to keypresses, to UNIX commands, to all sorts of things. It's better to block or highlight (if relevant) the bad input than to try to correct it automatically. For one thing, if you encourage sloppy input, the brain automatically adjusts and will become even more sloppy; while this isn't necessarily a never-ending spiral it is still quite likely to lead somewhere worse than blocking bad input entirely.
(Incidentally, if you want to fiddle with your keyboard but you don't want to go whole-hog with switching to an entirely different layout, you can use this principle to switch around two keys really quickly. If you want to try your Caps Lock as, say, CTRL, that's fine, but be sure to unmap the CTRL key itself. If you don't, it'll just be frustrating as you try to force yourself to remember, and realize three weeks later that Caps Lock is still mapped to CTRL but you haven't used it at all. If you do unmap the old key entirely, you'll find you've adjusted entirely in as little as 5 minutes, and it's only another 5 minutes to go back, if that's what you decide. You can iterate on these things much more easily than you might think.)
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
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.
> Business Insider has annoying anti-adblocker popups. Is there some way to block websites that do this?
With NoScript blocking their javascript from even running, there's no annoying anti-adblocker popup. The article opened just fine and was fully readable.
Agreed. I actually got so irritated with this site, that I have added the simple blocker add in to chrome to block this site. I refuse to support them anymore. I dont care if they have something I want to read, Im not visiting that site ever again...
I work in the field - years ago I had someone create a small program called "TurnOffF1" that runs silently in the background. It captures any F1 keypush in Excel only & blocks the Help popup.
Maybe it is my poor skills with a key board or the design of my keyboard but I hit F12 on accident more often than F1. I hate F1 with a passion but F12, which does a save as, is useful.
I have never understood the hatred for caps lock. I use it all the time, probably press it 12 to 20 times a day. I also write a lot of reports with a pile of long acronyms that have to be all caps.
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.
I use a Model M and remap capslock to super/windows button. I'm so used to it I remap it on laptops as well. Have never come across an instance to actually use all caps.
I use my pinky to press shift and tab already. I press ctrl with the side of my hand. This way I can press both ctrl and shift at the same time, which is important for RTS and FPS games. Maybe I should map it to backspace like was suggested by WorldMaker.
Huh, must be keyboard size/shape differences but palm-pressing "fn" on my keyboard (where "ctrl" would be on a normal keyboard) while hitting "shift" with my pinkie is impossible without mashing other keys around them, and is really uncomfortable. End up pressing "shift" with the side of my first knuckle, that finger's so contorted. I use pinkie + ring when I hit two modifiers on that side, though that does mean I take a finger off "WASD", for gaming purposes.
It'd be easier to train myself to hit shift+caps (as a ctrl) with just my pinkie than to do the palm + pinkie method, I think. Again, probably a hardware difference.
tl;dr F1 is generally help . Excel's help is apparently slow to load and close. Hence, the interviewees removed the key to avoid pressing it, when they meant to press F2.
It's disappointing but unsurprising they didn't just have windows (autohotkey?) map it to F2.
Article says its a banking environment, nobody outside of desktop support will have admin access to their PC/Laptop.
That includes developers/application support/server admins/DBAs etc.
If you want an application installed that's not on an approved list request will likely go to IT security for review(Don't hold your breath). portableapps.com made life somewhat bearable.
PS No Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive, No personal webmail and a heavily restricted proxy for all browsing.
> Article says its a banking environment, nobody outside of desktop support will have admin access to their PC/Laptop
But then it should be even simpler: Have the desktop support team (or whoever manages all those PC/Laptops) solve it centrally, once and for all, for every computer in the company.
I removed capslock from my keyboard whilst in a previous job cause I never needed it and, worse, kept hitting it instead of tab accidentally. Not using Excell, just coding on a Linux workstation.
Huh! I've been considering remapping F1 in vim for a while, I might actually go ahead and use it for something quite common (I've already taken up F2-12 for other handy tasks).
Whoa, I briefly worked on a project related to this, over in Redmond, like 20 years ago (ya I'm an oldie). So weird to see this being talked about in 2017, based on an article from 2012!?!
My background is in banking, here is some additional info on the F1 key thing in case anyone is interested in this random odd topic:
The article is not exactly wrong but it's misleading (more on that later). Yes the F1 key opens the Excel Help Window. Removing the F1 key is NOT a common practice among bankers.
The origin, or one of the origins, of removing the F1 key as seen in this article, comes from how banks used to train their new interns and first year employees to use Excel. The first few weeks on the job at a Wall St bank were spent in a little training course and the training course was allowed to have a bit more "fun" than the real more professional side of the job soon to come for these rookies.
It was important to teach new banking analysts to be very efficient in Excel, this meant requiring them to memorize how to use the features of Excel without needing to look it up in the Help Menu AND training them to use keyboard shortcuts not the mouse, as keyboard shortcuts are faster. What this led to was some Wall St banks in their training class would have a little fun in training and tell new analysts/students to unplug the mouse from the computer (so you have to learn the keyboard shortcuts) and tell them to remove the F1 key (so they can't just look up how to do something that they should have memorized).
Of course, these training aid tactics of silliness were only relevant for the first few weeks on the job. As new analysts would very soon start learning all about macros and VBA in the second half of the training course. The F1 key can easily and quickly be disabled in a number of ways in the VBA editor of Excel [1] and the idea that a bunch of bankers are removing the F1 key from the keyboard so they don't accidentally press it while reaching for F2 as this article describes is frankly ridiculous. Everyone uses macros and if F1 is disabled it is coded not physically removed, more than likely the help menu has been remapped to a multi-key shortcut just in case.
To those comments who say this is banking and the computers are locked down to the point you cannot install other software or make changes to current software, this is partly true but this does not extend to blocking employees from macros and VBA in Excel. Using and writing Excel macros is crucial to the job and it is expected to be utilized. I have never seen a bank where access to macros and VBA is blocked.
Now, it is possible to go to a bank and see someone has removed their F1 key from their keyboard. But it is not a common practice. IF you do see an F1 key removed it usually is because either: (1) the person removed the F1 key during training and then lost it or just never replaced it. (2) They are a brand new employee still in training (though less likely because training has changed in recent years and fun is not allowed anymore). (3) They were told incorrectly by a frat buddy or other "wall street bro" that removing the F1 is cool and sign of being an Excel ninja wizard. Reason 3 is sadly the most likely reason and if you read the article you will see they only spoke to and interviewed banking analysts, i.e. brand new rookie employees, not real investment bankers who have been on the job more than a few months and are out of the analyst phase.
If I saw an F1 key removed at a bank keyboard I would judge that person a little as it would not reflect very well on an experienced banking employee - unless that person was on one of the tech teams in which case they can do what they want and many have their own keyboards (which are loud guys) and I wouldn't question their computer knowledge skills. The main reason not to permanently remove the F1 key after training is because other important finance software (like Bloomberg) needs the F1 key for other functions (in fact the bloomberg terminal official keyboard moved the help key to its own different button and its on a different row from the F1-F12 keys).
Also, having worked at Microsoft very briefly I think I can say Microsoft is aware of the issue of the F1 key Help Menu bothering some users where it is located and how slow the Help Menu can be. Back in 90s they used to talk to their customers and power users all the time and it's likely they still do today, in addition the telemetry they snatch from everyone these days. They know, they aren't changing it.
Lastly, while this was a mild case of an outdated and misleading article with a clickbait headline, business insider is usually much worse and I would just like to recommend that business insider be considered a fake news site and spam and blocked from Hacker News. Just a suggestion. Thank you.
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
1. It’s a bank. 2. Banks lock down their computers. 3. So you cannot install other software to fix this in software. 4. You do not have access to the system low enough to rename / remove the winhelp.exe crap. 5. No 3rd party hardware is allowed in the bank. So no bringing your own keyboard.
All the time we get into this threads on HN where the techie goes well you could just...bla bla bla. In the real would of corporate IT everything you say is a non-starter.