Yep, this drives me insane!
One short cut that I love (got it from Screensavers a long time ago I think), for standard .coms… in the address bar just type the name, say “codinghorror” and press CTRL+Enter, this adds the rest of the address around what you typed, and sends you right to the site.
Remember the pre-Windows days, when there were utilities that did something along the lines of MSWord’s AutoCorrect–but system-wide? It drives me bonkers that if the program I’m using even supports some kind of shortcut entry, I need to configure a unique dictionary to every program. Why doesn’t someone write a driver so that “teh” (followed by non-alphanumeric) is converted to “the”, whether I’m in notepad, word processor, email client, or a browser?
Sadly, not all developers are consistent, I’m a tab to the next field guy myself, but unfortunately sometimes when you teb, the cursor sometimes goes off to another field other than the password field, i.e Register hyperlink, this confuses users, therefore they tend to put thier faith in moving the mouse to the field they want.
I personally think a better method to save time during the day is get rid of those god damn log in screens altogetjer !!!
3 things:
(1) For the longest time in my pet-peeve with Windows XP Pro log on screen (non Active Directory) was that I thought it required me to move the mouse to my “User Icon” and click! Frustrating! Then on writing this post, I figured out pressing Tab twice (moves the keyboard focus and) opens the password field. OMG, I’m not a power keyboard user. Ugh.
(2) Sorry if this seriously off topic…
About that “Alt+SPACE-E-P”. That’s seriously killer stuff, right up there with Alt+Space-M-AnyArrowKey-MouseMove to move a window without pressing a mouse button (or to move a misbehaving, off-screen window).
I was going to mention PureText by Steve P. Miller, but it too doesn’t help with the console pasting. (It does help with pesky Microsoft Word and pasting text.)
What you need for console pasting by keyboard only is something that converts a user-defined keystroke to a mouse key or a multi-key macro. If you don’t have an aversion to adding another program to your computer… The only free program that I know that can possibly do that is “Mado tsukai no Yuuutsu” (roughly translated as “Melancholy of Windows Users”, available from Sourceforge.net). It is a key dispatcher that can totally remap your whole keyboard by using arcane text config files, FTW.
Example: Copy the default setting file dot.mayu to your %HOME%.mayu and add this at the very bottom:
window Console /ConsoleWindowClass/
key C-S-V = VK(RButton)
What the above does: In Console windows only, Control+Shift+V will do a clipboard paste by faking a Mouse Right (context-) button push.
Too bad “Mado” is in Japanese only (but works on my US English WinXP Pro). Also too bad this is add on software, which you have to cart to each computer to use. Makes “Alt+SPACE-E-P” that much easier to remember, no?
(3) Actually, Jeff Atwood, I would like to hear how you customize your mouse buttons. Future blog topic, please?
Let’s not forget having to re-enter regular US phone numbers with formatting because the designer’s a moron.
Worst sin ever, though: flushing all my input and showing me a blank form page for stupid errors, such as the phone number issue.
You’re right on with this one, this is something that drives me insane. Its right along the lines of slow loading pages that move the focus back to the username box (usually when I’m midway through my password).
Its absurd how many things like this some people don’t know. The other day I was moving some files around, I hit F2 to rename a file and a developer watching me asked how I did that so quickly. What?!
Oh how I agree with this post 100%. I am so sick and tired of seeing developers who can barely navigate Windows/Unix/Linux/Mac OS/whatever they are supposed to be working with. And standard forms like this is a great example.
I’ve often said that during the interviewing process, rather than having the applicant solve pointless brain teasers - where if you know the trick, you solve it in 2 seconds and if not, you sit there with a dumb look on your face for hours - we should sit the applicant down in front of a computer and ask them to perform some fairly simple tasks.
How they use the keyboard and mouse together is a window into how competent they are in my experience. Anyone who mouses over the username, clicks, etc. as you described also causes a part of me to die inside.
I will spread type, tab, type, enter everywhere I go!
Also, Jeff, thanks for unblocking me. It means a lot to be recognized as a good internet citizen even though my blog host is basically a digital sewer.
Thankfully, when I let people know that a tab can save them time, smiles happen and they are happy they are saving time. When that particular event happens, I let them know about the “Press W twice for WV”, etc, on forms.
It’ll be another 20 years before nearly all web surfing ages know the shortcuts, and to educate about the time savers on every form seems impossible.
You are WRONG. Pure and simple wrong. The problem has nothing to do with keyboard/mouse use and shortcuts. The problem is that you are typing your password to begin with. Your computer should do this - it is better at remembering things than you are.
I use kwallet for my passwords. When kwallet sees that the webpage is asking for my username and password and helpfully fills them in for me. If kwallet hasn’t been authenticated it will ask for my password, but it is one password to remember that accesses all the others I need to know.
I hate webpages that break this ability. Most often by having a slightly different URL each time I login (amazon.com), or splitting the username and password into different pages “for security”, so kwallet doesn’t know that it should enter aything.
Overall though I rarely have to enter my passwords, everything just works. Which saves my brain from having to remember hundreds of unmemorable strings, or worse using the same password everywhere.
P.S. There are dozens of programs that work like kwallet. Investigate them and find one that works for you (and that you would trust for your passwords). Quit doing yourself something that the computer should do for you.
It anoys me to no end when people use the mouse to go between consecutive inputs on a form. Also, Javascript to higligh the username form isn’t usually very anoying, unless you’re typing in a password when it fires. What also annoys me is in earlier versions of Firefox (or was it Netscape) where Enter wouldn’t submit a form, so you’d have to tab to the submit button and hit Space (of all things).
The first sentance of my last post should have said when I have to wait on them to do it with the mouse.
I can’t believe you guys are talking about keyboard shortcuts. That’s like elementry school. Or maybe I’ve just been doing this too long.
I hate passwords. Every website I go to wants me to register, create a user name and a password. So I had an idea.
How about a USB key that keeps track of all your login info, along with a USB socket on the keyboard? Keep the USB key on your keyring. Plug it into the keyboard when you sit down, you are logged in. Pull it out when you leave.
Then I was talking to a friend of mine who uses lots of different computers, and she wanted her whole environment saved on a USB keyfob. And why not? A gigabyte of flash memory is less than $20 now. You could keep you entire desktop, all your preferences, address book, etc, etc. on it.
Lets not even talk about where Windows keep browser cache.
This brings me back to the days of when I was in CS 331 class at good ol’ University of Hawaii. It was a computer languages class, the professor was rictoring on her use of emacs.
Emacs is great except for a few reasons:
While she is going through example code, she does some obscene shortcut and leaves the whole class boggled, even cutting and pasting is a pretty good way to loose your students.
You need to learn all of the shortcuts, maybe if we started to learn emacs in our 100 level classes. But humans are stuck on our ways, nowadays kids are using computers at a lot younger of an age, sure it’s great but also they can be learning bad[slow] habits…
Your stuck to using this old school text pad. I am sure you can fire up a command promt from any computer and log into the Universities Unix system and get your emacs, but what if you are in some controlled enviornment? You will be using wordpad and throwing around all these stupid worthless shortcuts.
I could go on, but then I would start to be looking like one of my old professors lectures…
I would rather make it like her assignments, short and leaving you thinking.
Shen
http://adijas.com technology consulting on the cheap
We should also remember to use proper label / with accesskeys for the form. ALT+U should give focus to the username field. It also helps with accessibility.
My worst web password experience was the site (for health care insurance claims) that happily accepted as a new password a 9 character string, but behind the scenes was truncating it to 8 characters (I guess 8 characters was the non-stated limit).
The auth page however, tried to authenticate using all 9 characters, so I’d get a ‘bad username or password’ error - no indication that the password should be no more than 8 characters.
However, as far as I recall, the controls were laid out in a keyboard friendly manner…
That was a nice, frustrating waste of half a day.
I’m with Jeff who said RoboForm. Just hit Alt+] and it brings up the login info for the current site. A keypress on the enter key and I’m logged in. Easy enough.
I don’t consider Alt-spacebar-E-P to be simple
Alt+SPACE-E-P is awesome. Right click works to paste at the command prompt, but that’s not really helpful, either.
(does silly animation, GPF’s)
No, it has to bluescreen at that point.
I don’t CTRL + TAB as much as I could
The cognitive dissonance between CTRL+TAB and ALT+TAB is a serious problem with tabs in general. Tabs aren’t listed on my taskbar, either, so sometimes I’ll close entire browser windows before I realize I closed the window that had the info I wanted squirreled away in a tab. 
P.S. I just hit tab in an attempt to focus the “post” button for comments - takes me to the top of the page. ~Sigh~
My bad. Try now.
This also illustrates the problem for multi-line textboxes: Enter cannot submit by definition. Sometimes CTRL+ENTER works, but this is not really a standard, at least not one I’m aware of.
Try standing behind someone and asking them to copy and paste something between programs.
When they use the mouse to manually select text regions, I die a little inside. Especially if its a developer doing it.