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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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 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 ;)
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)
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.
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.
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
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).
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...
[+] [-] myrandomcomment|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mfoy_|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] riphay|8 years ago|reply
And if I ever need to access the help function, I'd just stick a pen in the socket and hit the membrane.
[+] [-] turblety|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkbm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superasn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] froindt|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technion|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IshKebab|8 years ago|reply
Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.
[+] [-] int_19h|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 13of40|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtraffic|8 years ago|reply
The insights designers get from just watching someone use a product are always delightful. The idea is basically ethnography for design. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyc...)
'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.
[+] [-] WorldMaker|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 1_2__4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] meri_dian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabot|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] slezyr|8 years ago|reply
One of them Ergodox EZ ~$350 https://ergodox-ez.com/
[+] [-] dmitriid|8 years ago|reply
And this software is called "Excel". This should really be solved in software called "Excel". As in: remove functionality from F1
[+] [-] yread|8 years ago|reply
https://superuser.com/questions/291018/consume-keystroke-in-...
[+] [-] Lorkki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldMaker|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooper12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LambdaComplex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
I do keep the F1 key somewhere safe, to put back onto the keyboard, for the next keyboard user.
[+] [-] edw|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rubenbe|8 years ago|reply
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 ;)
[+] [-] hateful|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] glaberficken|8 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] Grue3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g09980|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Just fix Excel so that a second press of F1 makes the help screen go away, even if the browser is still launching.
[+] [-] zokier|8 years ago|reply
Even today I'm wary of task switching from a game, as it still doesn't seem to be entirely robust
[+] [-] teekert|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://dlcdnimgs.asus.com/websites/global/products/APfLG1Rk...
[+] [-] nayuki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bru|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DavidWoof|8 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] GCU-Empiricist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|8 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] atesti|8 years ago|reply
Luckily if I close it immediately without navigating, Chrome is clever enough to return me to the last tab
[+] [-] blockoperation|8 years ago|reply
https://gist.github.com/blockoperation/5ec91d666e670e39584d2...
[+] [-] raldi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenkstom|8 years ago|reply
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...