This week I had a bit of a “smart cookie” moment with my partner, which I thought was worth sharing with you all. One thing you should know about my partner is that he’s very capable with computers – he can type at 100 words per minute, his nickname in the office is “The King of Spreadsheets”, and he’s built his own computer from scratch in the past.
But it turns out that even the most knowledgeable of dogs still have new tricks to learn, as I discovered the other night. I was watching him rename some files, and I noticed that he was doing it in quite a long-winded way, so I asked him if he’d ever thought of using the F2 key on the keyboard.
“The what key?” he responded. I then pointed out the row of Function keys across the top of the keyboard, and showed him that if you click on a file in File Explorer, and then tap the F2 key once, it highlights the file name so that you can type a new name instead, and press Enter to save it.
He thought this was marvellous, and spent a happy five minutes playing around with it. When I told him to open his web browser, and showed him that the F5 key would refresh the page, he was cock-a-hoop!
The only exception to this rule with the Function keys is that on some keyboards (especially laptops) they double up some of the keys as they’re a bit pushed for space. So if your F2 key has another icon on it, like a speaker icon, then you might need to hold down the “Fn” key on your keyboard while you press F2 to rename the file.
Windows / Laptops
There is usually a way of switching the function keys back to their ‘classic’ original purpose – e.g. pressing f2 renames when using file manager and doesn’t turn the volume down, which is my laptop’s ‘default’ f2 function.
OK, these ‘classic’ fucnction key settings need to be learned, but their behaviour is typically application dependent rather than laptop brand/model dependent and therefore consistent across different laptops.
Another drawback of the ‘default’ single key press is the ability to change things accidentally e.g. hitting F8 on my laptop switches to flight mode. This problem doesn’t arise if the two key approach requiring Fn+F8 to be pressed is used.
I understand that this won’t suit everyone, but software companies need to offer simpler personalised configuration for their products that do not get overwritten with new releases.