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Comment by da_chicken | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but for the past 25 years or so, the conventional way to wake up a desktop computer whose monitor has gone to sleep was a nonspecific mouse wiggle or keyboard press. Why change that? Like how big of a deal was accidentally waking up your monitor? What problem are we fixing? What's our usability goal here? Is this requirement discoverable to the user or not?

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> Why change that?

Because it's NEW!! And therefore BETTER!!!!

> What problem are we fixing?

The problem that desktops were BORING, they had always worked the same way for SO LONG. They needed to be NEW! And therefore BETTER!!!!

I would like to switch round the accelerator and brake pedals on the cars of the people who make decisions like this. I'm sure they would thank me (provided they survived the experience), because having the pedals in the same position is OLD and BORING and changing them would be NEW!! And BETTER!!!!

For me it's not a very big deal; so many systems expect Enter now that I've turned Enter into my "nonspecific" keyboard press even in situations where it doesn't necessarily have to be Enter (like waking up a machine that's locked with XScreenSaver).

If I'm going to wake up a computer whose monitor is dark, I typically hit the super key, arrow keys, or sometimes the space bar and would never hit Enter as the first key. Why? I remember when people used to just turn monitors off manually before monitor power management, and I remember blank screen savers with first gen energy saving monitors that would turn off if they detected a blank screen. It only takes once where the monitor is off and you hit a key to turn it back on and accidentally confirm some dialog or accept changes or execute a command before you start using keys that don't actually do anything.

That's fair. In my case I have a habit of locking my screen, so that's rarely (if ever) a concern, but I suppose muscle memory is indeed hard to forget.

I move the mouse, actually the touchpad. It's safer than hitting a key. Then the password prompt appears. Why force us to swype up too? And why up when on phones we swype horizontally, patents?

True, I do favor the mouse. I should have said, "If I'm going to wake up a computer using the keyboard."

The keypresses go directly to the password box BTW. That is, you don't have to "swipe" or hit return before you can type your password, you can just type away your password and hit return.

So instead of just typing your password, you prefer to wiggle your mouse first, and then start typing your password?

Yes. Because then I know I'm actually typing into the password box and not the username box which will be shown in plaintext once the monitor wakes up.

Then press enter, and then type in your password.

Or more importantly, checking that the screen actually locked and didn't just turn off. You could be about to broadcast your password in a chat.

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