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[mustang6172]

shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

How is pressing two keys a shortcut compared to pressing one mouse button?

[The Seldom Killer]

Because you don't have to lift your hand from the keyboard, move it to the mouse and position the cursor before making that one mouse click. From the standard typing position for a touch typist it would be the quicker action.

[Carl-E]

I regularly use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse.  My first laptop was an IBM with that f*cking little eraser head pointing device instead of a trackpad or anything else... so I avoided it, and learned the keyboard shortcuts for damn near everything. 

[Zingoleb]

that f*cking little eraser head pointing device

my ex referred to that as a 'clit mouse' one day and I have never been able to think of it as anything else, since.

[LTK]

that f*cking little eraser head pointing device

my ex referred to that as a 'clit mouse' one day and I have never been able to think of it as anything else, since.

Here's why.

That comic is going to take over the world one day, I'm sure of it.

[Zingoleb]

How did I forget about that! Yeesh.

[Patrick]

I was gonna say "I only ever heard it called the nipple mouse" and then I read the comic and now I'm making a moot post

[Carl-E]

Better moot than never? 

[Sorflakne]

For the WoW players:

Did you know that typing /camp sets up a campfire and a little tent?  Only works outside of major cities though.

[Lines]

Huh. I did not know that. And sadly as I'm not playing, I probably will forget it by the time I ever start playing again. (I don't want Pandaria.)

I use shortcuts a lot. On a Mac they're super easy to find! Especially for the weird letters, which I can never seem to find on non-Macs...

[Omega Entity]

Ctrl + flicking the scroll wheel or Ctrl + the + or - button adjusts the zoom on webpages.

Clicking the scroll wheel on a link opens said link in a new tab.

[bainidhe_dub]

I use shortcuts a lot. On a Mac they're super easy to find! Especially for the weird letters, which I can never seem to find on non-Macs...

I don't know if there's another way to get to them, but all those accented letters and stuff are hiding in the number pad. The only one I use regularly is Alt+130 for é, but they're all there. Alt+135 is ç, 140 is ï, 155 is ¢, 156 is £, 164 is ñ, 168 is ¿, 175 and 176 are « and ». If you go to "Insert Symbol" in MS Word it will tell you the number.

[Lines]

See it's all the multiple numbers I don't get. On a mac, to get a é, you push opt(alt)-e for the accent and then the e to put the e under the accent. For a ç, it's just opt(alt)-c. So do you hold down alt and then all three numbers at once or one at a time? I've never been able to get the other letters to pop up.

[Pilchard123]

One at a time. I believe that certain word processing programs will let you use things like CTRL+SHIFT+MARK, letter.

For example CTRL+SHIFT+'  , e

[pwhodges]

See it's all the multiple numbers I don't get. On a mac,

On the PC these vary according to the country of the keyboard.  For instance, a UK keyboard will give acute accents on all five vowels if pressed with the AltGr key, but US keyboards don't do that.  But no keyboard matches the ease with which Norsk Data's keyboards in the 1980s could type all European and Scandinavian accents

[Skewbrow]

Wish I had one of those for I have not figured out how to input Danish/Norwegian diphtongs with my laptop (the alt+numeric code is not a good option, because there is no separate numeric pad - I would need to hit NumLock first, and that screws up so many other keys). Our standard keyboard layout has umlauted letters where the US/UK keyboards (IIRC) have curly braces, square brackets and such. I need to press AltGr to get those, which makes using Mathematica a pain. Lose some - win some.

[pwhodges]

I just keep the character map (in start/programs/accessories/system - why they hid it there beats me) open when I need to put in accents other than acute; or I Google a word that should have an accent and then copy from the first result that's correctly accented. If I have a document with a lot to do, I type without, then copy each required accented character and run through doing highlight/ctrl-V for each - tedious, but not actually that slow.  I never type the number, because it's more trouble to look it up than either of the ways I've suggested.

The ND scheme had a "supershift" key, and you'd type supershift+accent followed by the letter you wanted the accent on.  It accepted all the legal European combinations (that I knew of, anyway), and the keys chosen for the accents were quite mnemonic.  So "SS+o a" would give a-ring, "SS-: u" was u-umlaut, "SS+- d" that Icelandic crossed-d character, "SS+s c" c-cedilla.  More eastern diacritics like hook and macron were included.  You could even distinguish umlaut from double-acute accent properly (using SS+: or SS+").  So easy!

[LTK]

Dutch keyboards layouts use dead keys. All your é-s and ü-s and ç-s and ñ-s within finger's reach, without changing function for quotation marks or apostrophes!

[snalin]

See it's all the multiple numbers I don't get. On a mac,

On the PC these vary according to the country of the keyboard.  For instance, a UK keyboard will give acute accents on all five vowels if pressed with the AltGr key, but US keyboards don't do that.  But no keyboard matches the ease with which Norsk Data's keyboards in the 1980s could type all European and Scandinavian accents

As far as I remember, they never jumped on the personal computer wagon, and died out as a result, right?

A big problem with having a Norwegian layout, is that the consoles for most games that include them (Morrowind is one example) does usually not recognize the different keyboard layouts. I've tried my way blindly throughout key combinations for finding ; a lot of times - always a hassle. Fresh OS installs can be a hassle too - I've been very confused by my keyboard doing weird things some times.

[pwhodges]

no keyboard matches the ease with which Norsk Data's keyboards in the 1980s could type all European and Scandinavian accents

As far as I remember, they never jumped on the personal computer wagon, and died out as a result, right?

It wasn't quite that simple, but that will do in summary.

Financially, their downfall was the takeover of the British computer company WordPlex, which happened while I was there; this led, in time, to mass resignations, eventually including mine.  I could write a whole essay on what was wrong with this takeover, but will restrain myself.

Technically, their 32-bit computers were unusual, because they used their 16-bit computers as a front-end and I/O processor for them.  When the PC appeared, they didn't accept it for what it was, but instead spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shoehorn their 32-bit processor onto an ISA board so that the PC could be used as the front-end and look like one of their own machines.  This project was called "Butterfly", and was as delicate and insubstantial as its name.  When it died, they had no other added value to offer the PC, and had missed lots of other boats.  They then, just before I left, hived off the 32-bit processors as a company called Dolphin Server Technologies (which sank without trace, I think), and lived on as a rump, largely in the UK and Pakistan (bizarrely!), providing computer services of various kinds; for instance, for a time they owned one of the UK's oldest bulletin-board systems - Cix.

[Carl-E]

For special characters: Just install a different keyboard layout. Much easier over time.

You mean, like Dvorak?   

[The Seldom Killer]

It wasn't quite that simple, but that will do in summary ...

So what you're saying is that, while many children and students have to study history in books and classrooms, you took the shortcut of just being there in the first place.

Touche

[celticgeek]

Well, yes, you could look at it as a shortcut that several of us here took. 

[Carl-E]

Wait - living through something isn't a shortcut, isn't the long way around, by definition? 

[pwhodges]

But it meant that I didn't have to do anything to know about it - which is a shortcut for the purposes of this thread.

[Akima]

For special characters: Just install a different keyboard layout. Much easier over time.

You alphabet-users have no idea... Trying to produce a useful keyboard for the Chinese writing system was so hard that we basically gave up on the idea. Instead we use "input methods", which allow us to type Chinese using standard alphabetic "roughly-100-key" keyboards. This is, of course, super-convenient for people like me who need to type Chinese and English.

The shortcut to toggle between your last two keyboard modes on a Mac is Cmd-Space, or Cmd-Opt-Space to scroll through all your active modes. Apple's built-in support for Chinese is pretty good out of the box, offering several modes for Traditional and Simplified characters, but if you want a pinyin method, QIM is better.

A keyboard shortcut that surprisingly few people seem to know is that tapping the space-bar in your web-browser will scroll down the page.

[pwhodges]

The main product of the Japanese company who were agents for my software in the early 1980s was keyboards for inputting Kanji.  To the best of my recollection they had a variety of different sorts, some synthetic, where you typed the various strokes making up a character, and some with (I think) ten characters per key and ten shift keys to select them.  These were about as portable as a small mixing desk.

[Omega Entity]

Those would have been interesting to see! I do have a Japanese keyboard, but the modern variety - there's only a few extra keys on it that I'm aware of. On the new ones, you can just type in the hiragana or katakana (using the phonetics) and select what kanji, if any, you'd want to use after you hit the spacebar to move on the the next word.

[Akima]

On the new ones, you can just type in the hiragana or katakana (using the phonetics) and select what kanji, if any, you'd want to use after you hit the spacebar to move on the the next word.

I forgot to mention earlier, showing my PRC roots, keyboards designed for the Zhuyin Fuhao phonetic system which work in a similar way. This was abandoned in the PRC in favour of the Pinyin system in the early 1950s, but it's still widely used in Taiwan:



Pinyin-based Chinese input-methods work in a similar sort of way. You type in phonetic representations of the sound of a syllable, and the input-method offers its "best guess" at the characters you want in a ranked list. To select the "first cab off the rank" you just press the space-bar. The more intelligent input-methods are pretty good at putting what you intended to write at the front of the queue, especially when given a few syllables to match against their dictionaries. Sometimes though, you have to scroll through several lines of character-choices in a menu, and select the one you want by number. Having done so, the better input-methods "remember" that character and offer it as a higher priority next time, gradually customising themselves to the words you use most often. Many allow common words and even phrases to be typed with a single keystroke per syllable, but no phonetic system compares with the stroke-based Wubi for sheer speed (or steep learning curve).