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Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find?
- josephschmoe 12y agoThis annoys me endlessly.
- callesgg 12y agoI 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.
- gangster_dave 12y agoThe influence of Emacs.
- agumonkey 12y agoSlightly 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 12y agoI 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 12y agoSure. 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.
- alayne 12y agoIt forwards the email to another recipient, it doesn't move the cursor forward a character like Emacs.
- PeterWhittaker 12y agotl;dr: Because that's what Bill Gates was used to.
- quarterto 12y agoDo you really think people here have such a short attention span that they need a 100-word article to be summarised?
- PeterWhittaker 12y agoYes, 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.)
- fwr 12y agoPerhaps 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.
- Someone 12y agoThat gets worse if Outlook pops up an appointment reminder while you are typing a message. Such windows show (http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/comp/blog/2007/figs/bbf20070619_01_f01.jpg http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/comp/blog/2007/figs/bbf2007061...) that alt-S does Snooze, but Outlook reacts to that key press, too (or eats it before the pop up can see it)
- Aldo_MX 12y agoSadly, most cross-platform apps have a shortcut that gets triggered with altgr + key. I use US-International (a layout where almost every key has a symbol mapped to an altgr + key combination), and this is very frustrating, especially with accented vowels áéíóú and ñ (pretty common in Spanish). This is why I always prefer dedicated windows apps over cross-platform apps.
- ygra 12y agoEven dedicated Windows applications get that wrong on occasion, despite the UX guidelines stating that Ctrl+Alt should never be used for shortcuts for this very reason. Alas, people with a vanilla US keyboard layout won't ever notice ... Most recent thing that bit me in that regard was ReSharper.
- na85 12y agoI'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.
- 12y ago
- Tloewald 12y agoAnd this is why Microsoft customers can't have nice things.
- yread 12y agoOutlook is pretty good at everything else but email
- pling 12y agoIts shit at those things as well. Months of VSTO and Outlook forms will make you realise it's a pile of crap.
- snsr 12y agoI believe Outlook is still using Word to render HTML content in emails as well.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoWhich is ridiculous but strikes me to be done so as to ensure that emails prepared in MS Word render correctly in Outlook? Of course they could fix MS Word's HTML output and fix Outlook to use MSIE's rendering engine ... but that'd only reduce lockin by allowing Outlook users emails to be read properly in other MUA. Never going to happen.
- yuhong 12y agoWhat is funny is that Word 2013 can be configured to generate pages that even MS's own IE10 won't render properly by default.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoHTML content in emails is the real WTF. I wonder why no-one ever invented a nice markup format for email? Probably because the only type of person qualified to do that wouldn't be seen dead sending non-plain-text email.
- pling 12y agoOutlook 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 12y agoThat 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"
- renata 12y agoFor Alt-S, aren't AltGr and Alt different keys on your keyboard? I use the US-International keyboard layout and the right alt-key is AltGr and the left alt-key is Alt. Sending only happens with the left key.
- com2kid 12y ago> And the most annoying is shift+enter. Ctrl-enter is send in at least the US version of Outlook, it has been for years (e.g. at least the last decade I think.) Shift-enter is single new line, across all versions of Office apps.
- kyllo 12y agoThis is Windows, you're supposed to just click the buttons with your mouse.
- Too 12y agoAlt-S is used as "send" in many IM-applications. Alt together some character is used as hotkey in ALL applications. Hold it down and you will see a small underline under (usually) the first character of most buttons, press this character on the keyboard and the button will be pressed. I think it would collide with S quite frequently. It is AltGr-S you are supposed to use for localized S-characters.
- philbarr 12y agoAs 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?"
- easytiger 12y agoI think you might need this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
- michaelmcmillan 12y agoOn the contrary, I would believe. Outlook extensions is probably a great niche market, considering Outlook is the third most used client [1]. [1] - http://emailclientmarketshare.com/ http://emailclientmarketshare.com/
- easytiger 12y agoMore for his mental health....
- philbarr 12y agoGetting a bit tired with all the downvoting going on at the moment. I also have downvoting rights, but I hardly ever use them unless I see something offensive. Give it a rest, people.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- reddit_clone 12y agoHa. 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.
- chton 12y agoThat'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.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wil421 12y agoMany times conventions are broken by some upper level person who isnt in touch with the reality around him. Projects I have been on have suffered because people dont understand technology or the conventions users have become accustomed to.
- chton 12y agoAbsolutely, but if anyone understands technology, it's Bill Gates. I'm guessing the blame for this case resides with the middle management that forced the programmers to follow the wishes of the boss.
- smacktoward 12y agoThis would all be 100% true in an ideal world. Unfortunately, the world we live in is far from ideal.
- Cuuugi 12y agoI think the person paying you to do the work should have a strong say in how you do it, no matter how ridiculous.
- mikeash 12y agoThat person often has contradictory wishes. In this case, for example, it's likely that the person paying them to do the work wished for ^F to move to the next message and for them to build the best product for their customers. Good management involves prioritizing these things in order to sort out the contradictions, and good employees help with this process by pushing back against directives that contradict what appear to be more important goals.
- taeric 12y agoAmusingly, 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.
- reddit_clone 12y agoYep :-) Working between Windows and OSX all with different application behaviour can be quite taxing on the muscle memory. Esp. for heavy users of emacs and I suppose of vi. Countless times I have wished that there was an operating system level option to choose keymapping (emacs, vi, cua, whatever) and _all_ applications will respect that.
- taeric 12y agoI'm mostly ok with variety. Helps keep me thinking about what I'm doing. Well, as long as the shortcuts they use actually make sense. As I said in a sibling, why is C-d bookmark?! At least C-f for "forward" makes sense. It is surprising how "discoverable" many of the keyboard choices are/were in older editors. In emacs? C-c C-(first letter of what you want to do) probably works if you are in a minor mode. If not, try C-h b to see the bindings.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoI'd rather C-s was save, and C-f was find, consistently across all applications rather than the nightmare world you're proposing (which, to be fair, we're halfway in already). Unless you're distinguishing between search and find (even then, I'd rather not have a shortcut for whatever search does).
- taeric 12y agoMy problem with that is that it makes virtually zero sense to have a "save" option in the browser. Seriously, when is the only time that was what you wanted? :) Perhaps if it was remapped to "bookmark"? (C-d? Seriously?) Though, I should say that it was a quick trip to firemacs to get the behavior I wanted.
- chrisfarms 12y agoWhat 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.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoThere's also a common sig about "Please think twice about printing this email" with a wingwings of a little tree. That turns into some plain character as well. Maybe G? I kept wondering why everyone was ending their emails with G. I also wonder how much energy is collectively wasted sending that extra line in every email. It must add up to something from a storage, energy use, rendering, etc perspective. I wonder if it offsets any behavior changes that may help the environment by those who actually don't print. I doubt that little message is going to stop anyone from printing.
- fwr 12y agoThe character is P - until recently I thought it was supposed to be an initial, since the sentence begins with "Please" For reference: http://i.imgur.com/I1GET1w.png http://i.imgur.com/I1GET1w.png
- andyhnj 12y agoI 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}
- xeper 12y agoMicrosoft 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 12y agoYep. 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 12y agoF4 for simple search & ctrl+shift+F for advanced search.
- jpmattia 12y agoThe 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 12y agoBecause only a tiny percentage of their users would use such a feature.
- smackfu 12y agoThis post glosses over the fact that F3 is also a standard Windows key command for find. Does that work in Outlook?
- dfxm12 12y agoNo. 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 12y agoCTRL+E for simple find
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- georgeott 12y agoF3 and CTRL-E both work as FIND for me in Outlook 2010.
- rplnt 12y agoAnd that's one of many reasons why you should always allow users to configure their shortcuts. Thanks Chrome.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoHow? The closest thing I can find is configuring a couple of shortcuts for a tiny number of extensions that support it.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoMeh - 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 12y ago> 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 12y agoOK, 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 12y agoI 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?)
- supsep 12y agoCool story, but using Outlook is like using Internet Explorer IMO.
- Chronic29 12y agoAnd using Thunderbird is like using lynx
- heironimus 12y agoAfter 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."
- raverbashing 12y agoHow optimistic. No I believe that he meant exactly that and even then he wouldn't "have been convinced". The engineers never are (about usability issues)
- josu 12y agoSo Crtl+F being mapped to the find command in every other application wasn't "a really good reason"?
- danielweber 12y agoNo, 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.
- maddev 12y agoRight Bill Gates is so stupid he didn't know about Ctrl-F on his own damn OS.
- andrewfong 12y agoOr better yet, Bill Gates wanted user configurable keyboard shortcuts.
- coldpie 12y agoUsers can't handle that. Better leave the Ctrl-Q [Quit without asking] shortcut immediately next to the Ctrl-W [Close tab]. Love, the Firefox devs.
- Daviey 12y agoNo 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..
- josu 12y agoI couldn't agree more. Who needs a shortcut to send an email anyways?
- solutionyogi 12y agoThank 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 12y agoI seem to have 5 thumbs, as I often press the wrong key when using different keyboards.
- spobin 12y agoI actually like the ctrl+Enter shortcut for sending mail. It's used in a lot of other software too and I automatically try ctrl+Enter when submitting any text.
- skeletonjelly 12y agoHave you tried shift+enter?
- seebrown 12y agobecause outlook's find feature is horrible and they hoped to hide it so you won't notice
- shmerl 12y agoA 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.
- sigzero 12y agoThe same reason Outlook knows best when dealing with line endings. (Not!)
- deisner 12y agoI bet the humanitarian work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is his way of atoning.
- Aqueous 12y agoWell 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.
- dalek2point3 12y agoisnt this the story of pretty much every Apple product?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- spobin 12y agoAs 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.
- nicwest 12y agomutt also maps 'f' to forward and uses the vimish '/' for search. maybe there is a common ancestor here?
- dlitz 12y agoRaymond 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.