
90% of People Don't Know How to Use Ctrl+F (2011) - csense
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/?single_page=true
======
_jomo
It actually 'hurts' watching people wasting their time with awkwardly slow
things on their computers. I keep telling people to use the Home/End keys to
jump around in a line, to just hold down Shift for selecting text, pressing
Alt to jump/select/delete a whole word, etc. I'm not sure if the average HN
reader is aware of these tricks, but a bunch of developers I've met were not
until I told them.

I can't watch people clicking the new tab icon, clicking in their URL bar,
enter the site name and then switch back to the old site to keep on reading.
All it takes is a simple Cmd+L, URL, Cmd+Enter. Same with clicking links.

If you only use your browser twice a day, you probably wouldn't care, but a
lot of "tech-savvy" people don't actually have basic skills in using a
computer. This is something I hate about today's tech being 'beginner-
friendly'. You don't need to know anything about it to use it. I grew up with
this, but I still wish people were forced to sit down and learn some basics
about Computers, at least how to properly use them, before they could actually
use them.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I used to think the same until I used Plan 9 with its rio windowing system and
Acme editor revolving heavily around mouse chording. I no longer hold
prejudices for preferring cursor movements over keyboard shortcuts, unless
it's obviously more inefficient as opposed to more of a subjective grayness.

In fact, it's quite tragic how the mouse is somehow seen as a "luser" tool, in
favor of keyboard manipulation-driven interfaces being seen as more elite. No
one writes mouse-driven interfaces for programmers anymore, which is a sad
waste.

By the way, none of this is basic computer skills. It's purely arbitrary UI
convention and nothing more. Someone decided to bind certain key combinations
to reflect a particular semantic action, but it is by no means fiat in the
slightest. You're confused.

~~~
dkbrk
I haven't used Plan 9, so I'll have to take you at your word that the mouse in
an effective preferred method of input in its UI. I would be very interested
if you had some specific examples of how it is used. That said, there are very
real differences between methods of input that go far beyond "arbitrary UI
convention" and that make one or the other substantially better suited for
certain actions.

For example, the mouse is excellent at quickly moving to an arbitrary small
area on a screen. Take as an example the operation of jumping to a particular
character in a text file. To do this in emacs, I first move vertically either
by looking at the line number of my target and jumping to it, or by moving in
blocks (e.g paragraphs or code blocks) then by lines. Then I move the cursor
to the correct horizontal position, first by blocks (e.g words, lexemes), then
by characters. If my hand were already on the mouse, I think in a substantial
proportion of cases using the mouse would be faster.

But there are other considerations. There is a noticable context switch moving
my hand from my keyboard to my mouse and vice versa. Also, the mouse is only
really good at moving to an area: moving to a single pixel is quite difficult;
moving to a particular character is somewhat slower than moving to a word.
This imprecision is related to the redundancies (i.e non-injectivity) in
translating 2D analog movement to a 2D discrete position and mapping that to
some action. In contrast, keyboard commands tend to be discrete, precise and
minimal. While I could press the wrong key, that's a fairly substantial
mistake; pressing a key off-centre or pressing it a bit harder than usual
doesn't change the outcome of the command wheras a minute movement of my hand
could easily make my mouse input skip over to something unintended.

One application the mouse excels at is clicking hyperlinks, or something
hyperlink-like. Generally, these areas of input are large enough that a little
bit of imprecision is acceptable and the 2D input can be very efficient. This
comes up in emacs, for example when navigating info pages. You can either
cycle through the hyperlinks in a document with TAB and Shift-TAB, or you can
use the mouse. While it's a trade-off, generally I find the mouse to be far
more comfortable.

The keyboard also offers an exponentially larger space of possible inputs for
a given input length. The 2D input space of the mouse is quite large, but its
imprecision considerably limits the space of useful inputs (i.e it would be a
bad idea to assign a different command to each pixel of the screen). Like the
keyboard, this can be expanded by successive commands, for example with a
nested menu or compound actions such as click-and-drag. However, each element
of the mouse input is slower -- wheras a keyboard command sequence can be
entered as a whole from memory, each stage of the mouse input generally
requires responding to new visual input (e.g a new submenu that has opened)
and another distinct physical movement.

There is something to be said for combining keyboard chords on one hand with
the mouse in the other, this allows much of the flexibility of the keyboard
commands, but is still only really useful when the input is well suited to the
somewhat idiosyncratic properties of the 2D cursor.

Finally, I think the most important factor for many people is the context-
switch between touch-typing and keyboard-and-mouse. In this situation, even if
the mouse is a better input method (e.g for clicking a hyperlink), then there
may still be considerable advantages overall to just using the keyboard.

~~~
jodrellblank
One other thing I don't think you've covered is that keypresses have a clear
intent.

CTRL-W means "close tab" in a browser, SHIFT-HOME means "select to beginning
of line" in a text field.

With a mouse, it's frustrating to try and resize a window and click one pixel
off the edge, and bring a background window to the foreground instead -
because there's no encoding of your intent to perform a resize operation so
it's as likely that you were trying to reorder windows.

It also means that to make up for this, GUIs are trying to guess your intent -
just try selecting all the text except the first character, or including the
first character, or to the end of line not including the newline, or to the
end of the paragraph not including the beginning. Different programs,
different environments, will jump both ends of your selection around and/or
make it very hard to get down to the letter, as they override your movements
while wrongly guessing your intent.

It also means keyboard commands can be fired off in series, without waiting to
see the results - especially with the awful trend of personalized menus - with
a mouse + GUI you have to wait for the screen redraw between movements so you
can respond to what's drawn. With a keyboard you can hammer ALT+F, X, N for
File -> Exit -> No don't save, and know it will just work, no matter where the
dialog appears, or where the 'exit' has moved to on the file menu, or where
the cursor is on screen. Which is great for remote desktop sessions, but also
it feels less annoying.

------
MrBra
I told em so many times. They will just not care using it. The difference is
in the approach. First time we used the search in page, we went there
_expecting_ to find such a feature. Until they find themselves asking "what
the hell, isn't there a way to search in a page?" they won't use and remember
it.

I think that's caused by the already high level of distress the average user
is feeling when using a computer to browse anything else than Facebook. If I
remember good how it was for me, they would go like "ok now I'm doing this,
browsing this new webpage and I got so many things to remember already, the
site name, how I got here, will I find it again, ...", "do you know that you
can search a page with this key combination?? Stop! That's just too much! I
will learn about it when I finally arrive at level 2 of my progress on using
computers."

~~~
nulbyte
I think this is partly the case, coupled with a general assumption that
computers are magic. What is really fascinating is to listen to someone work
out a very complex logic problem verbally, then have no idea how to fix it
because the computer is "too difficult."

I wonder what would happen if I answered every question with "Press F1."

------
athrowaway27
I used to work with a guy who got way in over his head as a result of being
buddy buddy with the boss. He inherrited packaging of applications from
another guy who saw the writing on the wall and noped his way out of the
company...

This guy would google how to do each step in packaging an application, each
time he had to do it or modify an existing package, and would often manually
scan 100s of lines of scripts looking for a particular keyword, and still to
this day does it, even though i would bring up use of ctrl+f every single time
he would ask me for help, litterally hundreds of times. I got to the point
where i would tell him to let me know when he found the line he was looking
for and then i would walk back to my desk, it never failed that 10 minutes
later he would text me ok, i found it. After walking back to his desk and
helping him, he would move on to the next step, google what he needed to
change, and then try to prevent me from going back to my desk while he spent
another 10 minutes scanning lines of text to find the keyword he was looking
for... to this day, i bet he is still not using ctrl+f.... sickening that
someone can get away with that in IT.

------
yawaramin
I've noticed something else about less-computer-savvy folks. They have a
harder time finding items at various locations on the screen by name. If I
tell someone to click on e.g. the 'Tools' menu item, they'll spend a lot of
time focusing on different parts of the screen trying to find it. They don't
seem to be taking in the 'entire' screen at once and pinpointing all the
visible words.

~~~
zarify
Well, my idea about this is actually that we're so used to our eyes going to
the top of the screen when we hear the word "menu" and regular people don't
have the same associations.

I think if I went to a platform that followed a different design paradigm than
I was used it, I'd have my eyes roaming all over the screen as well.

~~~
yawaramin
Maybe ... but my point was that even when searching for an arbitrary word on
the screen, I notice that I'm significantly faster than a non-savvy user. E.g.
if I'm on a call with a support desk and they're walking me through some steps
on their website, I find I can easily 'take in' the entire screen and focus on
that one word they want me to click on. Of course, I know a website is a bad
example here, given that I could've just pressed Ctrl-F, but the idea holds
for other complex non-searchable UIs too.

------
chjohasbrouck
I think searching for things on the internet should be taught as a core
competency, like reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I feel like way too much of formal education is focused on memorization.
Especially now that we have this ubiquitous searchable memory called The
Internet, this time should really be spent teaching kids and young adults how
to actually do things.

But education focused on developing skills has its roots in trade schools,
where kids with bad grades were sent to learn how to retread tires. That
precedent makes skill-driven education a tough sell to parents. But I think
technology has advanced to the point where skill development is the way to go.

There's also resistance from academics who believe distilling university down
to a way to attain job market viability somehow cheapens academia; that
academics should at least to some degree be academics purely for the sake of
academics.

But I really believe that if someone has internet access and can wield it
well, knowing things is a problem that will solve itself over the course of
that individual's life. So why don't we just get on with actually doing
things? That's the part of education that benefits most from instruction and
traditional academic social structures anyway.

~~~
Theodores
I think that there is a problem with the 'three 'R's' not being taught
properly. I am shocked to find people hired to write copy for the internet and
lacking basic standards of literacy. Product copy, newsletters, blog posts for
'social media' and that sort of stuff requires some ability to spell, the sort
of ability that most people on this site had when they were aged 11.

There are also those that 'learned' to write with Microsoft applications that
capitalise the first letter of a sentence. When these people are allowed to
use something like Wordpress that does not have this magic, what happens? All
notion of punctuation goes out of the window and they do not care. They really
don't and little things like spelling and grammar shows that, plus if
challenged they state that it does not matter as there are more important
things - as if!!!

IMHO the 90% that cannot use CTRL+F cannot spell or use punctuation. They have
the reading age of a small child.

------
tragomaskhalos
Ctrl-F in Outlook wants to forward your message - that's f@cking annoying.

Slightly related: I'm a long way from being a vi guru, but even so it's
possible to astound people who only know the basic commands; I remember using
'xp' to swap two chars over that completely blew someone away, had to explain
that it wasn't in fact some secret incantation

------
rcthompson
In a similar vein, one of my coworkers, who is a programmer, almost never uses
the shift key. If he needs a capital letter, he just turns on caps lock, then
types the letter, then turns caps lock back off. I assume he must still use
shift to type things like curly braces and dollar signs, but he's so slow an
error prone from using caps lock so much (he sometimes leaves it on by
accident and then types half a line before realizing it's in all caps and
deleting it.

------
Animats
So where is it documented?

There was a time when F1 meant "Help". Some keyboards even had "Help" on the
keytop.

~~~
monopolemagnet
_A designer failed if help is needed._ usually holds for relatively-
straightforward apps and real-world designs.

The issue where clear, succinct documentation is needed is complicated,
enterprise applications which have expert interfaces.

~~~
exDM69
I strongly disagree with the idea that computer programs should be designed so
that no "help" is required. It only works in the simplest of applications.

In my opinion, a bigger issue is that most "help" dialogs are so badly written
that they are pretty much useless. They are too often written by a developer
who doesn't have a clear understanding of the typical use cases. When was the
last time you found anything useful behind the F1 key?

I see the effects of this in freshmen and newbie developers who don't ever
look at the manuals or documentation because they are used to it being non-
existent or unhelpful. I hate to be saying RTFM, but I have to because reading
the docs is a useful skill, unlike memorizing how a certain tool works.

------
makecheck
While certain commands are clearly good to learn, it does _require
consistency_ across applications. One or two offenders, especially high-
profile ones (Outlook!), can screw it all up.

If a user does start exploring short-cuts and keeps being "burned" by
unexpected behaviors, they will un-learn those short-cuts because they just
aren't useful.

------
monopolemagnet
Or hold Command (⌘) if they have a Mac and KeyCue.

(It uses the accessibility information for the visually-impaired to construct
an exhaustive list of every possible key-binding in the current application
context. Another example of many of designing for accessibility paying
dividends for beneficial, unintended uses.)

Screenshot:
[http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...](http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/media/2f5cc0b3-fe0d-44fe-8af1-744272f67ce6/00000024.png)

KeyCue:
[http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/](http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/)

~~~
lloydde
[http://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/](http://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/)
is a free alternative on the Mac to KeyCue.

~~~
monopolemagnet
It's the same principle, I tried it.

KeyCue lets you perform the action by interacting with the semi-transparent
HUD and has themes to make adjustments. 20 € is crazy high for modern app
pricing, definitely not at an optimal supply-demand point.

Here's the zillions of options, which vary widely in usefulness:

[http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...](http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/media/6cf70550-7113-44f0-b8ce-
ce30081790be/00000025.png)

[http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...](http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/media/83aa36d6-94b2-4166-a07a-8638a9181771/00000026.png)

[http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...](http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/media/3b5c6396-bee8-4f5c-8baf-8890d93bf964/00000027.png)

[http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/me...](http://content.screencast.com/users/xzxzxzxx/folders/Jing/media/7bcf1dec-e06f-49ce-b9d7-a085abf3fa49/00000028.png)

Plus, you're buying support and sustainability (unless someone were to torrent
it, which risks malware and reduces support & sustainability).

Cheat is very limited. It won't show modifier-only keys as KeyCue does, and it
won't even let me take a screenshot of it (because that involves Shift).

Minimal and free, or expensive, pretty with features: pick one. ;)

------
parenthesis
When I read the headline, I couldn't for the life of me remember what Ctrl+F
does — because I use it without thinking! Since remembering the hand movement,
I've almost forgotten the description.

------
roghummal
90% of people using a computer right now do so because the computer provides
something they want and what they want can be achieved with the
mouse/touchscreen, at a reasonable rate for them.

Click this. Swipe that. Tap out a facebook/twitter post. Gratuitous use of
autocorrect. These are the reality of that 90%.

Don't let your impatience lead you to treat these people poorly. Let them
learn by example. If you're sure they'll see the value in a shortcut then go
for it but back the fuck off if they don't respond well.

~~~
dingaling
> Gratuitous use of autocorrect.

Or the one that drives me crazy; the user sees a squggly-line under a word
early in the sentence they have just typed. To back-up to correct it they use
backspace to erase the entire sentence back to that word, correct it and then
re-type everything again, laboriously slowly.

I have to rise from my seat and look out the window whilst they do so.

------
atroyn
Many people now access the web from touch devices most of the time. I've often
been frustrated by the lack of access to keyboard shortcuts in mobile
browsers/mobile apps, but perhaps that's what a lot of people are habituated
to?

------
csense
Found this while reading
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319643)

~~~
MrBra
-1 interesting but wrong place here

------
sandGorgon
On the same topic, lack of a uniform cut-copy-paste mechanism in Linux makes
me jealous of the Mac people _every single day_.

On a Mac, you can use Cmd-C to copy from vim and paste into Firefox or your
shell/terminal. Try doing the same thing in Linux (even with the IBM CUA [1]
approved Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access)

~~~
roghummal
Middle mouse button? I only have to deviate to ^C, ^V when the applications
are... not really native.

I just pasted this comment from vim to chromium this way.

* Doesn't cover cut-copy-paste, just copy-paste.

~~~
sandGorgon
ahh... the good old days of three button touchpads on laptops. How I miss them
:(

~~~
hyperion2010
You should be able to bind three fingers to middle click on any modern
touchpad.

~~~
sandGorgon
well my 2-year old thinkpad does not recognize 3 finger touch. I would much
rather have a uniform cut-copy-paste command rather than wait for some funky
hardware support .. or upgrade.

If there was some magical way to get gnome-terminal, vim and firefox/chrome
honor a universal cut-copy-paste shortcut... then I'm golden. This is more of
a political than a technical problem.

Yes, I know I can remap keys in firefox, in gnome-terminal and browsers. But
then they dont work in skype.. or something else. I would pay good money if
there was a kickstarter around this.

------
SixSigma
And, of course, by Ctrl-F you mean pressing F3

oh, TMTOWTDI

which is part of the problem. Users don't even consider "I spend so much time
doing this, there must be a better way". Coupled with the "I don't read
manuals" attitude dooms people.

So systems are designed for people to get away with zero effort.

And from that we end up with baby toys instead of the best tools.

------
sullyj3
I was tempted to ask which keyboard shortcuts I should know about, but it's
difficult to free recall all the ones I know, let alone list them concisely.

------
MarkMc
It will be revolutionary when users can just say: "Siri, search this document
for ..."

~~~
ianamartin
Really? Because personally, I don't want to be sitting in a room full of
developers all talking to Siri all at once. That sounds pretty insane to me.

------
wodenokoto
Is that a lot or a few?

I'm serious, do we expect most people to know this?

------
simonblack
They don't know how to move the cursor one word to the right?

Very strange.

------
finalight
it's okay, i don't even know how to find text on iphone safari

