Why would you not want to use your mouse? Some tasks are most efficiently done with a mouse, but others can be done more efficiently with the keyboard.The problem isn’t so much using a mouse versus using a keyboard but rather the time it takes to switch between the two modes. Particularly when using a laptop with a touchpad, it’s faster to use the keyboard.

Why does it even matter? So what if you save a few seconds here and there? It’s a matter of keeping up with your thoughts. Suppose some series of tasks takes 20 seconds with a mouse but you can accomplish the same tasks in 12 seconds using the keyboard. The big deal isn’t that you’ve saved 8 seconds; the big deal is that you’re more likely to finish your tasks before you lose the thought that motivated them.

The same could be said for learning to type more quickly. Typing 20% faster doesn’t directly make you 20% more productive unless you’re a professional typist. The benefit is that your fingers can come closer to keeping up with your brain.

If you’d like to get in the habit of using your keyboard more and your mouse less, you may find this helpful. I’ve created a Twitter account for posting one tip per day on using Windows without a mouse. If you’d like to follow using Twitter, it’s @SansMouse. If you don’t use Twitter, you could subscribe via RSS. I’ve written a few dozen tips so far and they’re in a queue to be dribbled one per day. You could practice one simple tip per day until it is natural to use your mouse much less.

I use my mouse fairly often, though I’m trying to get into the habit of using it less. I’ve recently become persuaded that it’s worthwhile to use the keyboard more and that it doesn’t take that much effort.

Related post:

Four patterns in Windows keyboard shortcuts

Here are four patterns for organizing the most common keyboard shortcuts for Windows. First I’ll list the patterns, then I’ll give some qualifications and elaborate on the patterns.

1. Keyboard shortcuts involving letters are all of the form Control-<letter> or Windows-<letter>.
2. The letters used in Control shortcuts and Windows shortcuts don’t overlap.
3. Control in combination with navigation keys moves the cursor. Shift in combination with navigation keys makes a selection.
4. The Tab key cycles through things. What the key cycles through depends on what it is paired with.

When I say Control-<letter> I refer to shortcuts such as Control-C, holding down the Control key and pressing C in order to copy something. When I say Windows-<letter> I refer to holding down the Windows logo key in and pressing some letter.

My goal here is to stick to the most common shortcuts, ones that work across several versions of Windows and with many applications. Also, I’m not including any accessibility sequences such as sticky keys etc.

Control key with letters

Here are the common Windows keyboard shortcuts of the form Control key followed by a letter.

A	Select all
B	Toggle bold
C	Copy
F	Find
G	Go to
H	Find and replace
I	Toggle italics
N	New
O	Open
P	Print
S	Save
U	Toggle underlining
V	Paste
W	Close document
X	Cut
Y	Redo
Z	Undo

Windows key with letters

Here are the common shortcuts using the Windows key with a letter.

D	Show desktop
E	Open file explorer
F	Find
L	Lock computer
M	Minimize all windows
R	Run command

Exceptions

There is one common shortcut that uses a letter and more than just the Control key or Windows key: the combination Windows-Shift-M maximizes all minimized windows. But there are no common shortcuts of the form Alt-<letter> or Control-Shift-<letter> etc.

F is the only letter used with both the Control key and the Windows key. In both cases the command finds something. Control-F finds text within a file and Windows-F searches across directories.

Navigation keys

All the navigation key shortcuts come in pairs.

Control-Home moves the cursor to the top of a document; Control-End moves the cursor to the end.

Control-Left Arrow moves the cursor to the left one word; Control-Right Arrow moves the cursor to the right one word.

Control-Up Arrow moves the cursor up a paragraph; Control-Down Arrow moves the cursor down a paragraph.

Control-Shift-Home selects from the top of the document to the cursor location; Control-Shift-End selects from the current location to the bottom of the document.

Control-Shift-Left Arrow selects one word to the left; Control-Shift-Right Arrow selects one word to the right.

Shift-Left-Arrow expands the selection one character to the left; Shift-Right-Arrow expands the selection one character to the right.

Shift-Up-Arrow selects one line up; Shift-Down-Arrow selects one line down.

Tabbing

The Tab key alone moves the focus in a window, cycling through the controls in the order specified by the application.

Control-Tab cycles through tabs or through windows in an application with multiple windows.

Alt-Tab cycles through running applications.

Windows-Tab cycles through the Task Bar.

Adding the Shift key to any of the above key reverses the cycle order. For example, Alt-Shift-Tab cycles through applications in the opposite order of Alt-Tab.

Miscellaneous shortcuts

Most common Windows keyboard shortcuts are listed above. However, there are several shortcuts that are commonly used but do not fall into a regular pattern. Some of these shortcuts are listed below.

• Shift-F10 brings up a properties dialog, just like right-clicking.
• Shift-Delete permanently deletes a file, bypassing the recycle bin.
• Alt-F4 closes the active window or opens the shutdown dialog if there is no active window.
• Alt-Down Arrow opens a drop down list box.
• Alt-Print Screen grabs an image of the active window rather than the entire screen.
• Alt-Space opens the current window’s system menu.
• Windows-Pause brings up the System Properties dialog.

Most of the function keys are not used often. The most commonly used function keys are

• F1 to bring up help,
• F5 to refresh, and
• F10 to activate an application’s menu bar.

Related posts:
Using Windows without a mouse
Three ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows
Readable path listings
Integrating the clipboard and the command line

PowerShell version 2.0 shipped with Windows 7 and with Windows Server 2008 R2, but it only recently became available for other versions of Windows.

The release of PowerShell 2.0 has been more like a leak than a product launch. The announcement page hardly reads like an announcement. The title reads “Description of the Windows Management Framework on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.” What’s this “Windows Management Framework”? I’ve never heard of that. I just want the new PowerShell. The first time I saw this page was when someone sent me a link saying PowerShell 2.0 was available for XP. I thought they’d sent me the wrong link by mistake because I didn’t see anything about PowerShell at first. Only if you scroll down to the middle of a long page can you see links to download PowerShell.

I expected something more like the following.

PowerShell 2.0 Released

Download for your platform:

• XP
• Vista (32 bit, 64 bit)
• Server 2003 (32 bit, 64 bit)
• Server 2008 (32 bit, 64 bit)

I was asking about backup software for Windows the other day and a couple people recommended Cobian Backup. It’s simple to use, but also very configurable. And it’s free.

You can have the software simply copy files or you can have it zip the output (.zip or .7z format). In either case, you don’t need the backup software in order to restore your files.

The software has all the features you’d expect. You can perform full, incremental, or differential backups. You can run backups manually or as scheduled tasks. Etc.

The default font options for the PowerShell console are limited: raster fonts and Lucida Console. Raster fonts are the default, though Lucida Console is an improvement. In my opinion, Consolas is even better, but it’s not on the list of options.

Mastering PowerShell by Tobias Weltner explains how to expand the list of font options for the PowerShell console. The same trick increases the list of font options in the Windows command prompt cmd.exe as well. The book is free for download. See page 16 for details. However, I have two comments about the instructions it gives.

First, the book says “The name must be exactly the same as the official font name, just the way it’s stated under [registry key].” However, the Consolas font is listed in the registry as “Consolas (True Type)”. You should enter “Consolas” and leave out the parenthetical description.

Second, the book says “the new font will work only after you either log off at least once or restart your computer.” When I tried it, logging off was not sufficient; I had to reboot my computer before the font change would work.

Related posts:

Improved PowerShell prompt
A couple thoughts on typography
Better R console fonts

In a previous post, I discuss my difficulties calling some Python modules from IronPython. In particular I wanted to call SciPy from IronPython and couldn’t. The discussion following that post brought up Ironclad as a possible solution. I wanted to learn more about Ironclad, and so I invited William Reade to write a guest post about the project. I want to thank William for responding to my request with a  very helpful article. — John

---

Hi! My name’s William Reade, and I’ve spent the last year or so working on Ironclad, an open-source project which helps IronPython to inter-operate better with CPython. Michael Foord recently introduced  me to our host John, who kindly offered me the opportunity to write a bit about  my work and, er, how well it works. So, here I am.

To give you a little bit of context, I’ve been working at Resolver Systems for several years now; our main product, Resolver  One, is a spreadsheet with very tight IronPython integration. We like to describe  it as a “Pythonic spreadsheet”, and that’s clearly a concept that people like.  However, when people think of a “Pythonic spreadsheet”, they apparently expect it  to work with popular Python libraries — such as NumPy and SciPy — and we found that IronPython’s incompatibility put us at a serious disadvantage. And, for some reason, nobody seemed very keen to  solve the problem for us, so we had to do it ourselves.

The purpose of Ironclad is to allow you to use Python C extensions (of which there are many) from inside IronPython without recompiling anything. The secret purpose  has always been to get NumPy working in Resolver One, and in release 1.4 we finally  achieved this goal. Although the integration is still alpha level, you can import  and use NumPy inside the spreadsheet grid and user code: you can see a screencast  about the integration here.

However, while Resolver One is a great tool, you aren’t required to use it to get the benefits: Ironclad has been developed completely separately, has no external  dependencies, and is available under an open source license. If you consider  yourself adequately teased, keep reading for a discussion of what Ironclad actually  does, what it enables you to do, and where it’s headed.

[click to continue...]

The Windows version of R has functions for reading from and writing to the clipboard. These can be used to move data back and forth between R and Windows applications such as Excel. However, there are a few gotchas. See the following link for details.

Moving data between R and Excel via the clipboard

Scott Hanselman has a good article on freeing up disk space under Windows Vista. I tried one of his suggestions and immediately freed up seven GB on my wife’s PC.

The PowerShell Community Extensions contain a couple handy cmdlets for working with the Windows clipboard: Get-Clipboard and Out-Clipboard. One way to use these cmdlets is to copy some text to the clipboard, munge it, and paste it somewhere else. This lets you avoid creating a temporary file just to run a script on it.

For example, occasionally I need to copy some C++ source code and paste it into HTML in a <pre> block. While <pre> turns off normal HTML formatting, special characters still need to be escaped: < and > need to be turned into < and > etc. I can copy the code from Visual Studio, run a script html.ps1 from PowerShell, and paste the code into my HTML editor. (I like to use Expression Web.)

The script html.ps1 looks like this.

$a = get-clipboard;
$a = $a -replace "&", "&";
$a = $a -replace "<", "&lt;";
$a = $a -replace ">", "&gt;";
$a = $a -replace '"', "&quot;"
$a = $a -replace "'", "&#39;"
out-clipboard $a

So this C++ code

double& x = y;
char c = 'k';
string foo = "hello";
if (p < q) ...

turns into this HTML code

double& x = y;
char c = 'k';
string foo = "hello";
if (p < q) ...

Of course the PSCX clipboard cmdlets are useful for more than HTML encoding. For example, I wrote a post a few months ago about using them for a similar text manipulation problem.

If you’re going to do much text manipulation, you may may want to look at these notes on regular expressions in PowerShell.

The only problem I’ve had with the PSCX clipboard cmdlets is copying formatted text. The cmdlets work as expected when copying plain text. But here’s what I got when I copied the word “snippets” from the CodeProject home page and ran Get-Clipboard:

Version:0.9
StartHTML:00000136
EndHTML:00000214
StartFragment:00000170
EndFragment:00000178
SourceURL:http://www.codeproject.com/
<html><body>
<!--StartFragment-->snippets<!--EndFragment-->
</body>
</html>

The Get-Clipboard cmdlet has a -Text option that you might think would copy content as text, but as far as I can tell the option does nothing. This may be addressed in a future release of PSCX; it has been assigned a work item.

Werner Vogels announced on his blog that Amazon now supports Windows on its EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud).

Here are three approaches to entering Unicode characters in Windows. See the next post for entering Unicode characters in Linux.

(1) In Microsoft Word you can insert Unicode characters by typing the hex value of the character then typing Alt-x. You can also see the Unicode value of a character by placing the cursor immediately after the character and pressing Alt-x. This also works in applications that use the Windows rich edit control such as WordPad and Outlook.

Pros: Nothing to install or configure. You can see the numeric value before you turn it into a symbol. It’s handy to be able to go the opposite direction, looking up Unicode values for characters.

Cons: Does not work with many applications.

(2) Another approach which works with more applications is as follows. First create a registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER of type REG_SZ called EnableHexNumpad, set its value to 1, and reboot. Then you can enter Unicode symbols by holding down the Alt key and typing the plus sign on the numeric keypad followed by the character value. When you release the Alt key, the symbol will appear. This approach worked with most applications I tried, including Firefox and Safari, but did not with Internet Explorer.

Pros: Works with many applications. No software to install.

Cons: Requires a registry edit and a reboot. It’s awkward to hold down the Alt key while typing several other keys. You cannot see the numbers you’re typing. Doesn’t work with every application.

(3) Another option is to install the UnicodeInput utility. This worked with every application I tried, including Internet Explorer. Once installed, the window below pops up whenever you hold down the Alt key and type the plus sign on the numeric keypad. Type the numeric value of the character in the box, click the Send button, and the character will be inserted into the window that had focus when you clicked Alt-plus.

Pros: Works everywhere (as far as I’ve tried). The software is free. Easy to use.

Cons: Requires installing software.

Related links:

Entering Unicode characters in Linux
Unicode resources
Greek letters in HTML, XML, TeX, and Unicode

Microsoft did an experiment similar to the Pepsi Challenge from years ago.

Microsoft asked people their opinions of Windows Vista then asked them to take a look at Mojave, a supposedly new version of Windows. See The Mojave Experiment. Not surprisingly, people had favorable things to say about Mojave. There wouldn’t have been a Mojave web site otherwise. To Microsoft’s credit, they do give some details of the experiment on the web site. When the participants were told that “Mojave” is really Vista, their reactions were very similar to the Coke fans who were told that they’d just chosen Pepsi.

There’s a deeper analogy between the Mojave Experiment and the Pepsi Challenge. One reason Coke fans often preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test is that they didn’t drink much of the samples. Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, and so people may prefer a sip of Pepsi to a sip of Coke, even if they would prefer a can of Coke to a can of Pepsi. People may be impressed with a demo of Vista but frustrated when they have to use it for a few days. On the other hand, I don’t doubt that many people have been prejudiced against Vista and would enjoy using it if they gave it a chance.

On the Windows PowerShell blog, Jeffrey Snover links to a article in Linux Magazine by Narcus Nasarek comparing Windows PowerShell and Linux’s bash shell.

The article’s sequence is unexpected. Not until near the end of the article does Nasarek get to the main difference between PowerShell and bash: PowerShell pipes objects, not text. Nasarek says regarding PowerShell’s object pipeline “Bash cannot compete here.” He says that the disadvantage of bash in this regard is that “it relies on the abilities of external programs to handle data structures.” That is an understatement. The disadvantage of bash is that it requires fragile, ad hoc text manipulation to pluck data out of the pipeline.

Nasarek is being fair to PowerShell, but he was limited by space. He had only two pages for his article, and only about half of those two pages were devoted to text.

Windows has never made it easy to read long environment variables. If I display the path on one machine I get something like this, both from cmd and from PowerShell.

C:\bin;C:\bin\Python25;C:\bin\TeX\miktex\bin;C:\bin\TeX\MiKTeX\miktex\bin;C:\bin\Perl\bin\;C:\ProgramFiles\Compaq\Compaq Management Agents\Dmi\Win32\Bin; ...

The System Properties window is worse since you can only see a tiny slice of your path at a time.

Here’s a PowerShell one-liner to produce readable path listing:

$env:path -replace ";", "`n"

This produces

C:\bin
C:\bin\Python25\
C:\bin\TeX\miktex\bin
C:\bin\TeX\MiKTeX\miktex\bin
C:\bin\Perl\bin\
C:\Program Files\Compaq\Compaq Management Agents\Dmi\Win32\Bin
...

(If you’re not familiar with PowerShell, note the backquote before the n to indicate the newline character to replace semicolons. This is one of the most unconventional features of PowerShell since backslash is the escape character in most contexts. Because Windows uses either forward or backward slashes as path separators, PowerShell could not use backslash as an escape character. Think of the backquote as a little backslash. Once you get over the initial shock, you get used to the backquote quickly.)

Update: It occurred to me after the original post that there’s an even simpler way to display the path.

$env:path.split(';')