Accidentally clicking the middle button when using Linux/windows

I’ve been doing some work with RISC OS lately, and now I’m starting to find myself clicking the middle button to open menus when I’m using my Linux/windows computers. Has this happened to anyone else?

Anyway, I just wanted to try some stuff:

test test

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I’ve been doing some work with RISC OS lately, and now I’m starting to find myself clicking the middle button to open menus when I’m using my Linux/windows computers. Has this happened to anyone else?

Frequently. I’ve also tried to right-click files to add/remove them from the current selection and it drives me bonkers that Windows doesn’t support that!

I’ve been doing some work with RISC OS lately, and now I’m starting to find myself clicking the middle button to open menus when I’m using my Linux/windows computers. Has this happened to anyone else?

I’ve been doing that for years, right the way back in Win 3.0 days with much cursing about how useless Windows was.

I’ve also tried to right-click files to add/remove them from the current selection and it drives me bonkers that Windows doesn’t support that!

Left-click while holding Ctrl.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a mind-screw switching back and forth. Why does Firefox open up the HTML source code all the time? Dammit, I’m pressing ^U to delete what is in the URL bar… ;-)

Left-click while holding Ctrl.

Yep, by “doesn’t support” I meant without touching the keyboard :)

Ah, but Windows is quite inconsistent here. Most things require some sort of keyboard assistance. A Shift here, a Ctrl there. Plus things like Alt-Space if you can’t get at the window ‘furniture’ (or can’t be bothered to move the mouse). Alt-Tab is another infamous one.

Then there’s the System Tray. I dunno about recent versions of Windows, but in XP and Vista there doesn’t appear to be any non-mouse way of interacting with the stuff in the tray…

Anyway, I think the issue can be summed up as follows: RISC OS never developed without a mouse. It was standard and expected. As three buttons were specified, a UI developed to make best use of the functionality. Windows, on the other hand, was born into a world where a mouse was optional, so early versions needed to have ways of interacting with Windows in ways that did not necessarily require any pointing device.
Back in the Windows 3.1 days, serial mice were kind of crap so I often found it easier to do stuff using the keyboard and frequently ignore the mouse.
Of course, this sort of thing tended to annoy some people. As part of an RSA IT course, I was supposed to rename a group of “.do” files “.doc”. The way we were being taught? With the mouse. One by flippin’ one! So I run the MSDOS prompt, go to the directory with the files in them, then enter rename *.do *.doc and the job’s done. DOS is smart enough to do that much by itself.

Windows key + B lets you get into the notification area (commonly, but incorrectly, known as the “system tray”). I have no idea whether it was possible in Windows 95, when the Windows key didn’t yet exist!

I frequently right click on scroll buttons in Windows and are annoyed every time nothing happens. I’m very surprised Windows hasn’t added this action years ago.

Except for Shell_TrayWnd, TrayNotifyWnd, and of course SysTray.exe (which I think just plonks the sound control in the SysTray Notification Area these days.

It was the system tray, now it isn’t. And no amount of complaining is going to exorcise that…
…kind of like “RiscOS”, absolutely never the way it was to be written, so long as you pretend not to see the capitalisation in the source plus various internal documents. ;-)

PS: Thanks for Win+B. I didn’t know that! B? Why B, I wonder?