Comment by BorRagnarok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BorRagnarok | Hacker News Reader

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That is a horrible set of shortcuts. Who uses the Game bar or dictation bar? Who needs a shortcut for Settings? Are you really opening your settings screen so often that a shortcut actually improves your efficiency? If so, do you do actual work on your machine or do you just play with Windows on it. How many seconds in a day are you going to save with the Settings shortcut, and isn't that number going negative when counting the time it takes to learn and remember the short cut?

Who needs a shortcut to Ease of Access settings, or to the narrator? Who needs Start+, if you already have Start+D?

Start+Ctrl+D opens a new virtual desktop? Despite me never using virtual desktops? And now I have to learn all about virtual desktops (while I don't need them) to correct my accidentally pressing the Start button too when I was typing Ctrl+D. Thanks guys, for making every key-combo some or the other shortcut for stuff I don't need. My windows experience is quite good but for the growing fear of accidentally hitting some unknown shortcut and screwing things up.

Microsoft, please start removing shortcuts that no one needs, you surely must have all the telemetry data to support my point by now.

> Who needs a shortcut to Ease of Access settings, or to the narrator?

Seriously? Those are probably the most important shortcuts on there. Having a way to immediately jump to accessibility settings is critical for all of the people who need those tools when they sit down at an unfamiliar computer, or even their own computer.

As for all of the others, yes, they should all be there. If you use it, dictation is something that's done frequently, as is use of the Game Bar (how else would you call it up during a full screen game?) and virtual desktops.

> Microsoft, please start removing shortcuts that no one needs, you surely must have all the telemetry data to support my point by now.

The fact that they haven't removed them should be enough evidence that they are, in fact, used.

Echoing the part that if you use Game Bar, you probably use it frequently. It's the easiest way to pull up a clock in a fullscreen game without losing focus from the game. There's also useful things there like screenshot capture, multi-window volume control, and game mode control (prioritize the game's threads over background work on the PC; sometimes you do want to enable/disable it based on if you need a compile to happen in the background sometime soon or if you want to focus on the best gaming experience you can get).

(Furthermore, the updates to the Game Bar currently in Xbox Insider Preview right now add a ton of new useful widgets including things like direct access to your Xbox Friends list without needing to jump to the Xbox App. It's becoming an even better PC-world equivalent to the Xbox Guide blades on an Xbox One. Bringing things closer to what you can do with the Discord or Steam overlays, but universal across all your games rather than developer or launcher specific. [Hopefully the widgets will be extensible in the future and maybe help us move to a world where it can eat those other two overlays; one overlay to rule them all.])

You might consider that your needs are not representative of the overall Windows population. For example, one reason some of these key combinations are important is for accessibility.

> Microsoft, please start removing shortcuts that no one needs, you surely must have all the telemetry data to support my point by now.

Happy to see you aren't working at Microsoft.

This constant push to remove everything that someone doesn't see the value of is really annoying for me.

Most of these shortcuts has been there for years.

The fact that you weren't even aware probably shows that this isn't a problem at all.

So please Microsoft: continue to "just work".

I far prefer Linux, but there is something to be said for "just working" for a very long time. (Feels crazy to say and I have a fair number of annoyances with Windows, but even if Windows never made me happy like a good KDE 3 or 5 setup, even Vista and 8 was kind of usable for me after some configuration, this is something I cannot say certain alternatives at that time)

(Now, there is one really crazy shortcut IMO, and that is alt + shift + space; enabled by default at least until Windows 8. Will change you keyboard layout with next to no visual feedback. Why this needs to be there by default on machines that will never be used for more than one language is beyond me, but I'll leave that to the experts, I'd rather have too many options than to few.)

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