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Search - "key shortcuts"
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Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.
Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)
Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.
Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.
Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.
Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.
Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)
When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.
Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)
Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)
And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?
Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.
For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)
Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.
Teach them advanced google searches.
Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.
Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>6 -
Switching between Mac and Windows and always getting confused with key placements and shortcuts :c9
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I know most people will be unable to relate here, but FUCK THE FRENCH PC KEYBOARD LAYOUT
FUCK YOUR STUPID ASS ALT-GR (right alt that acts as modifier while the other alt is used for shortcuts, but can't be combined with ctrl because that would make an alt-gr) THAT GIVES YOU ACCESS TO | ON THE F*IN 6 KEY AND \ ON THE F*IN 8. FUCK YOUR USELESS ASS ² KEY, THAT ONLY WORKS AS A ². NOBODY EVER USED THAT KEY FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPLAINING THAT "you know, I really hate the ² key, it's absolutely useless"
THE MAC LAYOUT IS 100 TIMES BETTER, WITH MORE GLYPHS ACCESSIBLE WITHOUT THAT RETARDED "special characters" MENU. WHOEVER DESIGNED A KEYBOARD THAT REQUIRES PEOPLE TO USE THAT MENU EVER IS THE ONE I'D CALL SPECIAL. NEVER HAVE PEOPLE REFRAINED FROM BUYING A MAC BECAUSE OF THAT LAYOUT, SO START USING THAT LAYOUT INSTEAD OF THAT RETARDED, ANTI-DEV PC LAYOUT...
Here's the French PC keyboard layout, notice how every useful key for devs have been placed to maximize annoyance, minimize typing efficient and accelerate ergonomically related diseases11 -
TL;DR just read this
So my current (student) job. Asked me to count inventory. Did so, on paper because nobody had a list of the product barcodes for easy cumulative scanning. I also made records for every single barcode. Then I had to key it in onto the Bookkeeping and sales software thing. They don't have keyboard shortcuts, so I quickly made an ahk script.
Had to manually type in everything 3ven though I had a digital listing.
Software lets you print barcodes for products but gives you an error when you try because you haven't assigned a code. WHICH YOU CAN'T DO IN THAT Crap. You also can't search for a product based on code.
Found out it used access as a back end for that buggy c++ thing that crashes with 'operation not permitted' when you press the red x. Great! Now I can import! And there is a barcode field. Wow. Fucking fantastic. What a fuckfest.
Their website. Their fucking website. Great from a user's standpoint, but my God. It uses joomla! However, version 2.5. That hasn't been supported for a long time. Part of the images are hard coded into the theme. The text editor flips. Adding a page sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes makes 2 pages.
And their cnc lathe runs on a laptop with Windows 3 on it, but hey, fine5 -
I'm forced by my job to use this fucking unusable piece of horse shit also know as a Windows operating system.
And it's not only that I have experienced every fucking corner case bug that is possible to occur in our universe.
Not only that that for last 2 years I seen more blue screen than blue sky.
Not only that forced updates fucked my schedules so many times that now I'm really *afraid* to turn off my computer off because I have zero guarantee that I will be able to restart it in a reasonable amount of time.
No, neither of those broke me.
The thing that kills me everyday is, piece by piece ...
WHY THE FUCK THERE IS NO SINGLE, USEABLE, SANE TERMINAL EMULATOR ON WINDOWS
I JUST WANT TO TYPE SOME COMMANDS, COPY/PASTE TEXT AND SCROLL
IS IT TO MUCH ?????
FUCK CMD
FUCK POWERSHELL
FUCK WSL
FUCK ALL THOSE WANKY THIRD-PARTY EMULATORS
FUCK EVERY-COMMAND-LINE-REALATED THING ON WINDOWS
FUCKING USLESS SHIT
CANT EVEN DO SOME SSH COPY/PASTE SHIT
WITHOUT SOME WEIRD CHARACTERS POPING OUT EVERYWHERE.
AND FUCK THAT EVERY ONE OF THOSE MUST HAVE TOTTALY DIFFERENT SET OF KEY SHORTCUTS
AND THAT FUCKING BELL
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN PUT A FUCKING BELL SOUND AS DEFAULT SETTING ??
GO TO HELL MICROSOFT
I WANT MY LINUX BACK7 -
MacBook/OSX
Have used all kinds of OSes and computers. Nothing sucked the productivity out of me as much a company provided MacBook. Some issues were related to the company setup (vpn issues after sleep, jamf botched app installs). But most of the day to day work was just due to crappy key handling. Lots of shortcuts that work everywhere don't (think all the alt combos in terminal). Common things require combos and using the actual keys (like home and end) on an external keyboard have undefined behaviour. Out of the box it does not even have decent window management, this means that a third party tool has to provide the shortcuts and they clash with a few programs.
Thank god I can use Linux now to develop for Linux.6 -
True story: After making a mistake while writing a check, I literally reached out to an imaginary keyboard and wanted to ctrl+z it... if only life was that simple1
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I got the Aero15. Had to send it in because ctrl+alt+shift+s (IntelliJ Preference menu) and some others critical shortcuts weren't working. Got a reply a week later.
"Thank you for using our service. The explained fault isn't actually a fault. If you want to use that button combination simply remap the FN key. Mind you this will disable any FN key combinations."
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"What about all the other combinations?"
....
"Ok we returned it to the technicians who will do their best to repair it."
....
I await their response. But seriously, for a company that makes GAMING keyboards this is pretty embarrassing. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. -
Some interesting keyboard shortcuts that are lesser-known but can be quite useful:
1.Windows Key + . (Period): In Windows 10 and later versions, this shortcut opens the emoji panel, allowing you to quickly insert emojis into your text.
2.Ctrl + Shift + T: This shortcut reopens the last closed tab in most web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge). It's handy if you accidentally close a tab and want to retrieve it quickly.
3.Ctrl + Backtick (`): In some text editors and IDEs (like Visual Studio Code), this shortcut toggles the integrated terminal window, allowing you to quickly switch between editing and running commands.
4.Ctrl + Shift + Esc: This directly opens the Task Manager in Windows, skipping the intermediary step of opening Ctrl + Alt + Delete and selecting Task Manager.
5.Alt + Drag: In many graphics and design applications (like Photoshop), holding down the Alt key while dragging an object duplicates it. This can save time compared to copying and pasting.
6.Ctrl + Alt + D: This shortcut shows the desktop on Windows, minimizing all open windows to quickly access icons and shortcuts on your desktop.
7.Ctrl + Shift + N: In most web browsers, this shortcut opens a new incognito or private browsing window, useful for browsing without saving history or cookies.
8.Alt + Enter: In Excel, this shortcut opens the Format Cells dialog box for the selected cell or range, allowing quick formatting changes without navigating through menus.
9.Shift + F10: This shortcut performs a right-click action on the selected item or text, useful when you can't or don't want to use the mouse.
10.Ctrl + Shift + V: In many applications, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Word, this shortcut pastes text without formatting (paste as plain text). It's useful when copying text from websites or other documents.
++ if you like this6 -
Why, the , fuck , can I not set Chrome to use MRU when switching tabs on Linux!
The extensions don't work, and trying to set in in the shortcuts is impossible, because when capturing keys , the tab key is not suppressed! -
Now the problem arises on how to remote control a linux machine with the i3 window manager. (With gui)
Teamviewer sends the windows key as the alt key and now no shortcuts work ...2 -
Imagine a text editor having single key shortcuts of letters that do random things to the text document (like delete it, hide it or who knows what) if your focus is on the toolbars, not the textarea and it is impossible to distinguish where you have the focus, until you start writing
well, wait no more!! its called Google Keep! available in stores now!1