Re: Keyboards!
Reply #56 –
If you mean, for instance, why I'd consider to "experimenting" with assigning something else to F1 than "help" the simple answer is that I find that a waste of a perfectly good function key. In Opera I've already had it defined as something else for years.
If you can remember all those customisations, then it's not really experimenting

For me, however, it would be. I am not a champion of keyboards, and I need to be able to type on several throughout the day. My customisations of keyboard behaviour involve only setting NumLk on or off at login on different machines, redefining Caps Lock, and making a few charsets available (Estonian, Swedish, Greek, and Russian; I never use US). This is already quite many elements of confusion, isn't it?
Different programs have plenty of their own keyboard shortcuts that differ and are hard to remember. I usually go through somee trouble to harmonise the keyboard shortcuts and other configuration across programs I use most, but this is not to be done too extensively so as to forget how the program behaves out of the box, when I need to deal with the program on some other machine which is configured differently.
There are some customisations that are best avoided. For example some people set
rm as alias for
rm -i and when they are on someone else's machine, the command they are used to won't work as expected. I have set
del as that alias.
However, I disagree with the author of the page I linked that Ctrl + Z/C/V is particularly problematic, and if modifier keys like Shift and Ctrl aren't pressed automatically without noticing it, you can't properly touch type (my apologies to people with disabilities; that statement may not apply to them).
What finger would be on Ctrl? Pinkie? I usually press Ctrl with the thumb. I really need to make myself extra alert like "Hey, this is not normal typing. It's a keyboard shortcut!" to get it right.
In my opinion, the only way to get "hand stress" there is if you incorrectly use only one hand.
Hand stress is gradually becoming a real issue for me, but because of mouse rather than faulty typing. My mouse hand wrist needs serious vacation.