In October 2021 I purchased the laptop which I am currently tapping away on. This ASUS E410M (the model is largely irrelevant) has survived being hit by a car and apart from cosmetic damage to the case, has performed admirably. There was one thing that found particularly annoying and that was the removal of the use of the Alt key.
I am glad to report that Alt is back.
In what surely has to be the first-worldy of first-world problems, complaining about the minor operation of how Windows 11 works is the zenith. There are an infinite amount of more important things in the world and yet, this most minor of ailments is the one which has stuck in my craw. Probably because it is so minor, I found it more annoying than the pain of being hit by a car. Being hit by a car is the result of an accident which nobody ever plans for and so even though the consequences are far worse; so I can accept that. Someone deliberately mucking up Windows and who has taken active steps to change how a thing works, which affects millions of people, is a very different thing.
I bet that you're sitting there on your phone or tablet and thinking that I am a loon for thinking about such a petty and small thing but as someone who works in the land of information, or numbers, of generating words, and manipulating documents, I think that I am more likely to directly notice this kind of change, than someone who I will admit does real work in the real world and moves around real things.
There are only so many commands that can be directly picked with Ctrl and a key.
Ctrl-X = Cut
Ctrl-C = Copy
Ctrl-V = Paste
Ctrl-A = Select All
Ctrl-Z = Undo
Ctrl-Y = Redo
Ctrl-P = Print
Ctrl-N = New
Ctrl-O = Open
Ctrl-S = Save
When you start getting into programs with many layers of dropdown menus, then you really don't want to have to find and click the relevant thing. There is one program that I use which had (and I say had because it no longer does in Windows 11) the sequence of keys of Alt-K-P-O to pick something off of a third-level menu. When Windows 11 took away the use of the Alt key, that meant using the mouse to pick through three menus to get what I wanted. Now that it is back, I am once again a very happy bunny.
One of the fundamental conflicts of an operating system/GUI like Windows is that it has to be all things to all people. 'All People' is a very very broad category and can be split into two very very large tribes. The first tribe are those people who want/need to use a mouse or a pointing device for a myriad of reasons. The second are those people who want/need to manipulate what largely amounts to boring blocks of text and/or numbers. I am definitely a member of the second tribe; being someone who works in an accounting office and who writes an extraordinary amount of text. It is the artists, the gamers, and the people who only need to input a small amount of text into small spaces who benefit the most from having pointing devices.
I am old enough to remember a time when computers didn't normally have mouses. In those days (which seems like an eternity ago), the Alt and Ctrl keys were the prime method of navigating around programs and the working spaces therein. Now it can be very argued that the invention of the mouse and then the more intuitive interface of using your finger to point at a thing is a vast improvement on using the Alt and Ctrl keys but just like playing a harpsichord, it is far quicker to press a key to play a definite note than it is to draw a bow across a string to produce a note which might not be as accurate. Manipulating glyphs which are all discrete units of information with width of one, is far quicker if that is done with a series of key strikes as opposed to using a pointing device. The use of the Alt key in picking off menu items, is exactly picking off a discrete unit of information (in this case the headline of a menu item) with width of one.
When Windows 11 arrived on my new lap top, there were (and still are) lots of things which used to be menu items on a list that have now been consigned to being an icon. Windows 11 which was likely designed with tablets as the prime end used market, tried to better integrate the user experience of pointing at things to get what you want. I suspect that this is because the boffins at Microsoft still remember the abject disaster that was Windows 8 and were so traumatised that Windows 9 had to be abandoned before it was even started; which meant that Windows 7 became the starting point to develop Windows 10. Windows 11 is still mostly the same as Windows 10 (I still use the 'classic' interface) but I am continually reminded as a desktop and laptop user, that we have been relegated to the steerage rooms below deck. Taking away the Alt key meant that we had to bail our own bilge.
This was the situation until some time last week. For reasons that are unknown to me, the boffins at Microsoft decided to notice us users of desktops and laptops and heard our tortured cries from below decks. In giving us back the Alt key, they have finally acknowledged and realised that looking pretty is only a secondary want; behind having a machine that does what you want.
Yet again I am reminded of IBM's slogan from the 1960s: "Machines should work. People should think." Some time after 1966 this was later reduced to just the single word "Think" but the longer form of the slogan was far more clever. If you have a machine that works properly, then you do not need to think about it. The best journeys on a train or a bus, are the ones where nothing of import happens at all. Boring is beautiful. When machines don't work at all, or work in ways that aren't idea, then that forces the user to have to think. It seems almost paradoxical but when you have to think about what you are doing, it is less efficient than just doing something and this is because the machines were working in the first place.
Taking away the Alt key meant that as an end user, we had to do more thinking and more searching and hunting to find what we wanted. When I use the Alt keys, I don't have to find anything because I am already telling the machine that this is the thing that I want. Furthermore, I am so quick at doing this that I can enter Alt commands at a rate which is faster than the machine can display them in. Frequently I find myself after having entered a string of Alt and Ctrl commands, standing at the printer and waiting while my machine cycles through the commands that I've already inputted.
I am glad that the Alt key came back. Rather, I am glad that the people at Microsoft eventually thought enough of use to give us back the Alt key. I don't have to Alt-E-F what I am looking for and can Ctrl-F things far quicker than before. Microsoft Crtl-Z a bad thing and Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V from Windows 7. Ctrl-S, Alt-F4.
Addenda:
Almost immediately after posting this, I got a question with regards to the Alt-Right. I personally would like to press the Delete key on the Alt-Right as a political ideology but having just written a piece about the Alt key, it seemed tangentially connected.
Alt-Right as a command only works if there is a highlighted group of text/cells which have been selected. Alt-Left will take to to the extreme left of the string and Alt-Right will take you to the extreme right of the string. They work similarly to Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End if you want to go to the top or tail of a document.
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