Control

But on the flip side. If you tell somebody something they don't know like:

'You can open links in new tabs by klicking on them with the mouse wheel.'

Or

'You can reopen closed tabs by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T'

They look at you like you've just shown them the meaning of life. Bonus points if you see them using it later.

Man, 2 weeks into an IT job, we're doing a presentation and our VP of IT accidentally closed a tab. Felt like a wizard being the only person in the room, somehow, who knew that hotkey.
You can what?!
👍

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To:chiliedogg

Subject: link

Message Text:

C:\Users\Windows\Jimmy\Desktop\Presentation943.pdf

Having spent many years in tech support and also being my family tech support, this post pains me.greatly.

I get to see other people ways of using the computer daily.

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.

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.
- “Proximity Fix”
- 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.
- 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."
The Sysadmin Field is a known phenomenon!
- 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.
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.

there is a reason i use i3wm on linux.

You cannot use my computer, it is impossible.

Part of the reason I installed Arch (BTW) is to see the looks of confusion and concern on my family's faces as I'm computationizing
- I have never installed pure arch. I like endeavor OS.
- it's definitely a benefit. It's always fun showing people how nicely you can navigate and how cleanly you can configure things.
I could unless your i3 config is atypical
- this person dotfiles.
- good news for you, i use mostly stock binds for navigation, the defaults are always the best, and a few extraneous ones for launching applications and configuration and such.
ah, the feels of keyboard(mostly)only navigation.

bonus points to get someone to quit vim.
- it's so nice, the best invention ever. The worst as floating WMs. Terrible idea.
  
  Anyway i quit vim, to use nvim instead :)
Do you game? If so, how is it with tiling?
- yeah, play minecraft and factorio mostly, it's great. Opening a game in bordered with another window is a little goofy sometimes, but you can set that workspace to be stacking/tabbed instead of splitting, and that solves that problem, you can also just make it open in fullscreen if you want though. One of the really nice things is since it's a WM dealing with any sort of fullscreen operations are going to be pretty substantially simplified.
  
  I have had a few weird input issues but that might be my config, i haven't gone through it incredibly tediously. I can highly recommend at least trying a WM if you haven't before, i3wm is quite nice as it's extremely minimal but mostly configured out of the box, you'll need ot do some minor config but other than that it's usable once installed.

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.

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.
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.
- Try explaining this to your family.
- 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.
- 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.

When they dont use keyboard shortcuts.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.

Permanently Deleted

why are you moving the fucking mouse for this?
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 typing

It'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.
- 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'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.
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.
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
- 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
- DUDE IT'S CALLED A STICKY NOTE
- Permanently Deleted

Seeing people with respectable typing speed using just their two index fingers. What a waste. They could have been great.

Your words do not hurt me, I'm already used to being a diappointment.
The fingers aren't the bottleneck, it's the brain. I type just as fast with two fingers as with ten.
Even if they were half as fast, it's so much more satisfying when you use all your fingers.

I remember day I started actually using my right pinky finger to press the semicolon. That's when I became a real man.
- That reminds me of when I learned to touch type 3 years ago, I went from 30wpm hunt and peck to 15wpm touch type
  Now I'm at ~80wpm and my small brain coming up with words is the limiting factor haha
That'd be me! Over 90 wpm with mostly my index fingers. I do use other fingers for some keys (I always hit space with my thumb and backspace with my ring finger), but it's mostly index fingers.
- Same. I imagine, for me at least, it's due to having deal with unendingly different keyboard models and not being in front of a terminal all day.
  
  I can however type relatively quickly with either my left or right hand and with the keyboard facing me or sideways. It's a skill that's really useful when helping someone out with an issue they're facing. (I prefer being at their side over remote, as I can gauge what they do and don't understand better)
People that learned on manual typewriters will do this.
- I (my parents) had a computer when I was 5 and didn't learn to type properly until I took a typing class on manual typewriters in middle school because computer games don't teach you to type and we didn't have the internet
Ah yes, my dad mastered the 2-finger-search-system
Cue Sean Connery in Finding Forester typing a full page with two index fingers like a boss.

Trigger warning link to scene

Watching somebody scroll to the bottom of a very long list by clicking the arrow button under the scrollbar is my idea of hell.

do those arrows still exist?
- Yeah, sometimes. I think Win11 fucks with scroll bars so they might be a line there.

Watching my partner play a FPS game has the same energy

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.
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
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.
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.

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 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.

I try not to judge people....unless I see them right-clicking to copy and paste. Ew.

Yeah, who wouldn't use the toolbar icons?!
- I.......
  
  Fuck you, man!
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?
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.
Double click then middle click gang.
Shift+ins gang
You've got me questioning my life choices
Middle click paste ftw.
Button2 and while pressed, button3 to snarf.

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.
- What do those do?

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 $EDITOR or their git editor, so it opened in vim and I had to intervene.
You never quit Emacs. You just... die...
Lucky!

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.

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 file

And 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.

Oh my goodness... my job requires me to work with a team on some fairly industry specialized software (steaming and broadcast television); the way my coworkers have their shit set up is so weird. It's like we are all speaking the same language, but with wildly different dialects.

In my job as a Product Manager, I make specialized software for internal users in my company. Watching people use it can be so painful.

An example: Look at dashboard view > memorize client name > go to client view > type in client name to search > click to view the client

When they could have just clicked to view the client from the dashboard.

After I finish cringing, I just take it as learnings for how to build/design better in the future.
Same, but CADD packages. Every UI is different for each app. Users each have unique configurations of buttons, ribbons, and task windows. Some apps even use completely different terms for identical concepts. Long ago I stopped remembering button and tool placement in autoCAD and just memorized commands because the GUI would completely change with every update and sometimes after a crash.

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

completely agree

👍

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

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?

Try sitting as a passenger while your friend takes your car for a spin.

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.

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.

I'm pretty savvy but I have learned a few tricks from others. Although some people make me grind my teeth down to nubs

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.

CTRL>B the change you want to see in the world

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…

YAYYYY

I'M GONNA USE YOUR COMPUTER TO STEAL YOUR IDENTITY

It's the same reason I can't watch people play games.

If I'm watching a let's play, I'm yelling at the screen inside 5 minutes because the player missed the SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS SLIGHTLY HIDDEN DOOR GO BACK AND GET THE LOOT YOU MISSED OH MY GOD

and if I try to watch someone play in-person, I'm still screaming, it's just all internal.

Yeah something tells me this ain't limited to computers, for you. God save whatever man, woman or child has to suffer your oversight.