On Mon, 10 Jul 2006, Peter da Silva wrote:
> I never hit the "win" key in Windows, except when I've been using a
> Mac recently and I'm going for Command. Can anyone come up with as big
> a waste of keyboard space as the two Windows keys and the menu key...
> all of which simply duplicate other perfectly good key combinations
> and can't even be usefully applied as hotkeys in other apps?
>
> (Is this keyboard hate or software hate)?
Au contraire, I used to feel this way, but once I got used to them I
realized that they made it possible to use Windows nearly sans mouse.
The Windows key is a global, application & context independent shortcut
to core OS resources. That's a tremendously useful thing to have.
By itself, it's a way to the start menu, but I almost never use that.
Far more usefully, [win]+[e] brings up Windows Explorer, typically --
unless someone's been fiddling with XP to increase UI hatefulness -- in
the split folders-on-left, views-on-right mode, as apposed to the
useless, screen real estate wasting views XP prefers.
Also, [win]+[f] brings up the search ("find") window, though here it
does default to that fucking puppy that Clippy gave birth to, unless
you've managed to fix XP to use the old search interface. So it's
useful, but also annoying, and possibly ultimately frustrating if
searching in training-wheels "puppy mode" doesn't work for you.
There are some others too, but I tend to forget them if I'm not using
Windows on a daily basis, which at this point has been over a year.
As for the menu key, show me any other way to bring up a context menu
for the current focus (highlighted) item without using the mouse. Okay,
yeah, sure, if you've gone to the trouble of pointing the mouse at
something then the right-click is only a tap away, but if you're doing
things through the [tab] and arrow keys on the keyboard -- and most apps
are extremely amenable to this on Windows, particularly core ones like
Windows Explorer and IE -- then having this key handy is excellent. And
the placement is good too: if your right-hand fingers are on the
inverted-T arrow keys, then your right thumb will typically rest near
the [menu] key, so you can usually tap it quickly.
I spent years ignoring these keys, and only started noticing how useful
they were after I'd more or less fully switched over to Macs from Linux
and Windows. Now, they're one of the last Windows features I miss.
So it goes.
--
Chris Devers
