
Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find? - shdon
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/07/15/10542285.aspx
======
chrisfarms
What I really like is when you get random J's in emails from people.

Took me a while to figure out this is some kind of autoreplace thing in
Outlook that switches out emoticons with characters from the wingdings font,
and J is a smiley face.

~~~
sharkbot
Raymond also answered that question on his blog:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/60474...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/05/23/604741.aspx)

WingDings mapped the 'J' character to smiley face; when the email goes to a
client without that font installed, it just displays the original character in
the default font.

Old New Thing is an awesome blog! J

~~~
smackfu
The latest Unicode updates should fix this. All those glyphs are now mapped to
Unicode points instead of ASCII, so if someone has an updated Wingdings font,
it won't be a 'J' anymore.

(It will be a box with a question mark, probably.)

~~~
andybalholm
If the sender has an ASCII Wingdings, and the receiver has a Unicode
Wingdings, the receiver gets a J (at least if the receiver is using Apple
Mail).

------
fwr
Perhaps a better question to ask is why Outlook maps "alt+s" to send, which is
how the "ś" diacritic in Polish is typed (also "ß" in German) resulting in all
kinds of funny/awkward situations in which incomplete e-mails are sent.

~~~
na85
I'd suggest the even more pertinent question to ask is: Who still voluntarily
uses Outlook?

Microsoft arrogance aside: Gigantic, bloated, monolithic proprietary
applications, written by a company known to be privacy-hostile and
surveillance-friendly, handling your potentially sensitive communcations? I
think not.

~~~
kalleboo
I thought you were describing Gmail/Google there...

~~~
dzhiurgis
Works better though

------
chton
That's an awful reason to do that. It shouldn't matter who files a bug report,
it should be handled the same way as all others. In this case, they broke
convention to please Gates, probably against the wishes of the people actually
working on the software. It doesn't matter if it was a regular user, Gates or
the pope, a bug report carries equal value.

~~~
Cuuugi
I think the person paying you to do the work should have a strong say in how
you do it, no matter how ridiculous.

~~~
chton
I'm thankful that we're (very) slowly moving away from that idea. That's what
they pay Product Owners for.

~~~
jessaustin
_Good_ PO/PM's care about the integrity of the product enough to argue with a
CEO, but developers intrinsically have extra motivation beyond just "product
integrity is valued!": every additional iota of product crappiness is painful,
every time they touch it.

------
heironimus
After reading comments implying that this is Bill's fault, here is how I'm
guessing this played out. I could be wrong, but I've seen it before.

Bill says "Why isn't Ctrl+F mapped to forward?"

Developer hears "Bill wants this mapped to Ctrl+F. I'd better it do it or I'm
fired."

Bill means "Please map this to forward, unless there is a really good reason
otherwise, in which case I expect you _not_ map it to forward, but tell me the
reason why not."

~~~
josu
So Crtl+F being mapped to the find command in every other application wasn't
"a really good reason"?

~~~
danielweber
No, it's a good reason. It's just that this particular user wasn't aware of
that good reason, and because of sacred cow syndrome no one would tell him
otherwise.

------
jpmattia
The real question is why does Outlook _hardcode_ Ctrl+F to Forward instead of
having a user-configurable keyboard mapping.

Maybe that's just the emacs background talking though.

~~~
EpicEng
Because only a tiny percentage of their users would use such a feature.

------
Aqueous
Well then the project manager should have argued back and said, Hey Bill, I
know you're the boss, but you're mistaken about this. This completely breaks
the convention from the rest of our programs and therefore the expected
behavior within our ecosystem. And then laid out several additional good
reasons why Ctrl-F is logically Find, not Forward, and asked him to deal with
the inconvenience.

Perhaps Bill would have fired them, but if he's as smart as people say he is
he would've been convinced by a good counterargument.

------
philbarr
As someone who writes a plugin for Outlook as his day job, I can think of
many, many better questions than this.

For example, at the moment it's, "why is Outlook ruining my life?"

~~~
reddit_clone
Ha. As someone who had written synchronization applications against Outlook
and Exchange, I can totally relate.

Programmatically rescheduling an instance of a recurring meeting that has
users on different timezones and daylight savings time adjustments. That's
pain that I will never forget.

For bonus points be that guy who had to implement such things on Lotus Domino.

~~~
tomsthumb
I will never again in my life write code that deals with timezones. It was far
and away the most wtf-dense thinking and coding I have ever done.

------
andyhnj
I got fed up with this fairly recently, and remapped it so I can use ctrl-F
for find, using AutoHotKey:

    
    
      #IfWinActive, ahk_class rctrl_renwnd32
      ^f::Send, {F4}

------
pling
Outlook shortcuts are a complete bastard.

You have Ctrl-F as discussed which is completely different to the rest of
windows.

You have alt-S for send as well which is used in some language for special
characters.

And the most annoying is shift+enter. When you want a single line break in an
HTMl email it sends it instead. This has a warning now.

No end of grief those have given me.

~~~
WCityMike
That last one is fixable.

I'm on Outlook 2007, so I don't know if the preference has moved in 2010 or
2013, but:

Tools > Options > E-mail Options > Advanced E-Mail Options > uncheck "Press
CTRL+ENTER to send messages"

------
dlitz
Raymond didn't answer the question; He answered a different question. The
question actually asked was about why---almost 20 years later---Microsoft
continues to ship new versions of Office with this inconsistency.

It's like if you discovered that your newly-built SF apartment building wasn't
earthquake-resistant, and you asked an engineer from the construction company,
"Why are you building new apartment buildings in San Francisco that aren't
resistant to earthquakes?", and the engineer answered, "Well, we designed our
first apartments 150 years ago when people didn't know very much about
earthquakes." The answer is a non-answer, and the practice itself is
unsustainable.

------
deisner
I bet the humanitarian work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is his
way of atoning.

------
taeric
Amusingly, I'm annoyed with browsers for not using C-s for "search." :)
Seriously, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to
"save" a web page. And none of them ever worked.

~~~
JadeNB
My use case for _very_ frequent saving is holding on to pages for later
reading when I don't have an Internet connection (at home, as it happens; or,
what may be a more common use case, on planes or (some) trains)).

~~~
0x0
Would printing to a pdf be a better workflow? Lots of sites seem to break due
to external css/js not working for an offline local copy.

~~~
JadeNB
> Would printing to a pdf be a better workflow?

It may be; I just have a foolish built-in mindset that "PDF is big, and HTML
is small" (uncontaminated by anything silly like checking the sizes of PDF and
HTML versions of the same page). Since I usually only use this to queue up
casual reading, it's not very important to me that it be an extremely faithful
copy; I just grab the "Print view" if there is one.

Firefox, with "Web page, complete", and Safari, with "Web archive", are both
pretty good at grabbing dependencies. If I really want a good mirror, then I
use wget.

------
oneeyedpigeon
Meh - no-one's perfect. Apple Mail treats cmd+r as reply; acting as an alias
for 'get mail' would make a lot more sense as it's analogous to refresh. I'm
forever switching between text editor and browser, then hitting cmd+r before
I've realised Mail was in my 'switch chain' and inadvertedly starting a mail
reply.

In an ideal world, there would be ~ 26 core commands that do (essentially) the
same thing in each application. We're nearly there
(cut,copy,paste,open,save,print,etc.) but actions like 'refresh' are poorly
served.

~~~
JadeNB
> Apple Mail treats cmd+r as reply; acting as an alias for 'get mail' would
> make a lot more sense as it's analogous to refresh.

However, Apple's poor shortcut choices are made much less egregious by a
built-in way of (re)defining custom shortcuts (under System Preferences >
Keyboard > Shortcuts); Windows does not natively offer such an option, I
think.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
OK, I must admit I hadn't fully appreciated the customisability before. App
Shortcuts look pretty good, and I can, effectively, get the exact behaviour I
want out of Mail. However, the method of assigning a shortcut must be one of
the worst pieces of usability I've ever experienced from Apple. From [1]:

"Type the menu command for which you want to set a keyboard shortcut in the
Menu Title field. You must type the command exactly as it appears in the
Application menu, including ellipses and any other punctuation. An ellipsis is
a special character that looks like three periods. To type an ellipsis, press
Option-semicolon, or use the Character Viewer. It may be difficult to know
whether the command is written in the menu with a real ellipsis or with three
periods, so if one does not work, try the other."

[1] [http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13916](http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13916)

~~~
JadeNB
I agree that the instructions are pretty terrible! What might be a better way
to do it? The best that I can think of is something like: "Click here to start
recording, and click here to choose a running application. The first menu item
on which you click will be chosen as the target."

(In fact, I seem to remember some sort of 'macro recorder' from back in the
Tiger days that worked on the level of literal mouse motion (and was fully as
fragile as it sounded, since it obviously relied heavily on the exact position
of things on screen). Does anyone else remember something like that?)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I don't know about the inner workings of Mac applications, but isn't there a
resources file that exposes menu items? Seems like this could be accessed via
some kind of API.

~~~
JadeNB
> I don't know about the inner workings of Mac applications, but isn't there a
> resources file that exposes menu items?

I guess so, if one knows how to read NIB files (which I'm sure any OS X
programmer does, but I don't):

$ cd /Applications/Safari.app; grep -r 'Show Top Sites' * Binary file
Contents/Resources/English.lproj/ToolbarItems.nib matches

> Seems like this could be accessed via some kind of API.

Sure, and there's no need even for it to be a public API, since it's Apple
software that sets the shortcut. My question wasn't how the _program_ should
handle it, but what would be the best way to present the choice to a (non-
programmer) user.

------
spobin
As a Gmail user it annoys me when people attach Outlook emails to messages in
a format that is readable only in Outlook. Come on Microsoft, play nicely.
You're not the only player anymore.

------
Daviey
No worse than Gmail having in compose ctrl+Enter, sending the mail... When the
intent is to start a new line, without starting a new paragraph..

~~~
solutionyogi
Thank you for sharing this! I am guessing that they borrowed Outlook shortcut
where Ctrl + Enter sends the email.

Try Shift + Enter to start a newline.

~~~
Daviey
I seem to have 5 thumbs, as I often press the wrong key when using different
keyboards.

------
callesgg
I hate that Microsoft translates stuff like that. Ctrl+h is find on Swedish
Microsoft stuff.

And forget about finding useful excel functions online cause the are all
English functions.

If might sound like a good idea until you try it. Working just becomes really
inconsistent, and hard.

The thing that the first letter is the keyboard shortcut helps a bit when
trying to remember but it does not help initially when looking for the
shortcut.

------
yread
Outlook is pretty good at everything else but email

~~~
Someone1234
Unfortunately that always happens when someone has the dominant market
position. If you look at last generation's email leader (Lotus Notes) they
were lazy and terrible until someone else came along who did it better (namely
Microsoft).

Now Lotus Notes is dead. Exchange/Outlook at the current front runners, and
they are producing really lazy email clients and not really pushing email
forward at all.

What can be done? No clue. The only organisation seemingly able to compete
with Microsoft in this arena is Google with their Google Apps for
business/education offering. But that has its own issues.

At least Microsoft has made "Outlook Online" a lot better in recent years
thanks to their push for Office 365 Subscriptions.

PS - Search in Outlook is shockingly terrible. For some reason during the
Vista era someone at Microsoft said: "Let's make search terrible in all of our
products." So Vista's search was junk (read: replace a nice Windows 95 search
sidebar with hidden obscure magic keywords which didn't work, and only index
"known" file types (which is none)) and that filtered down to Outlook which
got a huge bloated indexer which is inconsistent, slow, and still relies on
magic keywords to accomplish anything. PPS - Thunderbird also has a terrible
search indexer, however it also offers simple filtering which is wonderful.
You can disable what they call their "global indexer" (which you should, it
sucks) and then just use the "quick search" box within each folder, it is
insanely quick, and the filtering options offered a huge efficiency gain.

~~~
ams6110
Outlook search really is awful. I find it easer to find items by visual
inspection.

------
gangster_dave
The influence of Emacs.

~~~
agumonkey
Slightly realted, I like the fact that rarely I accidentally type complex
keystrokes like say C-x C-e C-m, triggering an undesired action. #genius

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
I pretty much always accidentally type the Emacs commands first, often in MS
Word this means I delete everything then save, rather than just saving, and I
end up saving a lot of webpages.

~~~
agumonkey
Sure. And C-w being `close window or tab` in many GUI I often `cut` my windows
away to heaven.

Also I dream of GUI textfields with emacs keybindings. I can't fathom
Ctrl-$arrow in Windows for instance. I need my home row.

~~~
jfb
Get a Macintosh. Emacs key bindings are ubiquitous.

~~~
agumonkey
I already felt Apple GUIs had something special and I didn't even knew this
fact.

------
shmerl
A perfect example of an awful decision. Preference of one person (who happened
to be the boss) were taken in account disregarding the common (i.e. most
expected) option.

Usability for the boss improved. Usability for most users degraded.

------
xeper
Microsoft doesn't follow the 'standard' for shortcut mapping or behavior most
of the time. Why would any of this give pause to anyone who's used their
products for any amount of time?

------
reddit_clone
Yep. This pains me no end. At least to search the inbox there is always a
search box in the upper right. I could never figure out how to search the text
in an opened email.

~~~
dfxm12
F4 for simple search & ctrl+shift+F for advanced search.

------
PeterWhittaker
tl;dr: Because that's what Bill Gates was used to.

~~~
quarterto
Do you really think people here have such a short attention span that they
need a 100-word article to be summarised?

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Yes, that was my conclusion after reading one of the other comments (which was
perhaps intended as tongue-in-cheek, but since I'm a literal-minded humourless
troll with a penchant for helping out, I thought I'd tl;dr just in case).

(Hey, if I save most of us from clicking on link-baity headlines that could
just have easily contained the answer to the question, we all win, right?
Right.)

------
smackfu
This post glosses over the fact that F3 is also a standard Windows key command
for find. Does that work in Outlook?

~~~
dfxm12
No.

As far as I can tell, there is no ctrl+f/F3 style find function in Outlook.
You have the search feature, but that behaves differently from ctrl+f.

I've taken to copying email threads and pasting them into Word or Notepad if I
need to do a proper find.

^^edit^^

I went out of my way to find out how to do a "find" in Outlook:

ctrl+shift+F for an "advanced" find

F4 for a simple find

~~~
pitnips
CTRL+E for simple find

------
sigzero
The same reason Outlook knows best when dealing with line endings. (Not!)

------
nicwest
mutt also maps 'f' to forward and uses the vimish '/' for search. maybe there
is a common ancestor here?

------
seebrown
because outlook's find feature is horrible and they hoped to hide it so you
won't notice

------
rplnt
And that's one of many reasons why you should _always_ allow users to
configure their shortcuts. Thanks Chrome.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
How? The closest thing I can find is configuring a couple of shortcuts for a
tiny number of extensions that support it.

~~~
josteink
I'm also not sure if this is sarcasm or not. Chrome is the least configurable
web browser ever made, completely hostile to power users.

~~~
rplnt
Yeah, it was sarcasm. I thought it wouldn't get lost considering how short and
simple Chrome configuration is.

------
josephschmoe
This annoys me endlessly.

------
dalek2point3
isnt this the story of pretty much every Apple product?

------
Tloewald
And this is why Microsoft customers can't have nice things.

------
supsep
Cool story, but using Outlook is like using Internet Explorer IMO.

