We all love you, shifty disco girl.

[venta]

Note to self: There is a shift key on the right of the keyboard. Look, it's quite big, just below the enter key. You should consider using it.

Because, you see, I don't. I use the left-hand-side shift key pretty much exclusively. Obviously, if the key I'm shifting is on the LHS of the keyboard, this can involve twisting my wrist round awkwardly. If I do it too much (as I seem to have done in the last 24 hours) I end up with quite a painful sensation in the outside of my wrist.

Does anyone have a deliberate policy (or know what their accidental policy is) on shift-key use ? When do you use right or left ?

If you were typing a long string of caps JUST LIKE THIS, how would you do it ? When someone noticed a while back that I occasionally use capslock for this kind of thing there were howls of disgust and derision as if I'd been caught out shagging a donkey, or somesuch. Do you ever use capslock ? Is there an optimal length of a string of letters at which it becomes "worth it" to use the capslock key ?

Further note to self: Hey, there's a Control key over on the right, too! Who'd have thought it ?

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I always use the left-hand shift-key. The right-hand shift-key on my laptop broke recently & while I was annoyed that it had broken, it didn't actually inconvenience me at all (though I got it fixed anyway).

If I was going to type a long string of caps JUST LIKE THAT, I would hold down the left shift-key with my little finger and just type the rest with the other fingers. My little finger more or less hovers over the shift key anyway; at least, it can automatically find it to do caps in the middle of things e.g. for Proper Nouns. (I don't touch-type properly, but I don't need to look at the keyboard and I type Pretty Damned Fast.)

My text-editor of choice has a command for "change to upper-case" so if I wanted to type a really long string of caps I'd just type as normal, then select the relevant bits of text and hit ^U.

I note that the left-hand shift-key is slightly closer to the letters on the left-hand side of the keyboard than the right-hand shift-key is to the letters on the right-hand side, if you see what I mean, because all the bits and bobs -- ",./;'#[]" -- get in the way. I suspect that's why it's easier for my left-hand little finger to hover over the shift while I carry on typing letters.

None of which wrist-twisting shenanigans seems to have given me the RSI that by rights it probably ought to have done. I have a vague theory that playing piano all my life (and violin for most of my life) has strengthened my wrists in some way. But I digress.

[venta.livejournal.com]

My text-editor of choice has a command for "change to upper-case"

So does mine, unfortunately, this may actually be a bad thing. I do almost all my typing in a text-editor, then on occasion am typing something like this in a browser and I automatically go for some obscure keyboard shortcut, and... bad stuff happens.

My current favourite is selecting a region of text, going for Ctrl-W to cut it, then remembering a smidgeon too late that Ctrl-W in Firefox closes your tab and loses the comment/email/world altering post you were typing :(

[philipstorry.livejournal.com]

Losing tabs in your browser? I'm a smug Opera user myself, and have no trouble with that. I can re-open any closed window, usually getting back not just the window but also any text I'd typed in it. Very nifty.

However, I was sure that there's an Extension to do something similar in Firefox. And a quick google found it:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/undoclosetab

It may need some hackery to get working, apparently. ANd I have no idea if it preserves the text you tyoped in a window, or if it just reloads the page that was there - I've not tested it in any way. But I hope it helps. :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha - thanks. I'll stick that on the list of Firefox extensions to mean to have a look at sometime :)