Conversation:

... alt Gr + right arrow - and you'll never guess what happened!


Everything went all sideways!!!

Then I tried to right it by doing the opposite: Alt Gr + left arrow - but that just made it the-other-sideways!!!!!!!

Anyone else ever had a surprising result from pressing a key combination?

PS - I sorted it by pressing Alt Gr + up arrow. Everything is back to normal now. I don't dare try Alt Gr + down arrow. I don't think my eyes would recover!

Spiff

I did something with some of those keys the other day, I had to switch the machine off and start again. They are dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

Ask lil - she's the expert

I've *never* pressed *those* buttons, swl

lil xx

I pressed some ofdd letter combination today. I can't even describe what exactly happened, but it was very weird. As if I was about to cut things on the screen, and I got what looked like coordinates. In my panic I hit escape, and that fixed it.

My keyboard looks a bit like it's been attacked by a madman with a hammer. It's for this very reason that I've pried off all the keys that I don't need but are very annoying when hit by accident: Caps Lock, Alt Gr, Insert, F11...

B

For quite a while in school (a year at least), our music lessons mainly involved tinkering with keyboards, with some vague assignment which we performed after a month or so.
Being rubbish at music, I got bored quickly. Then I discovered that pressing certain combinations of the many settings buttons simultaneously caused it to make the sound of a certain key being pressed. I spent a good couple of lessons experimenting to discover which combinations had this effect, and which keys they corresponded to. It had no musical relevance whatsoever, but I don't think I would have been any more fascinated by it if it had.

When my daughter was only 2, she used to sit on my knee while I played computer games - Commander Keen!

She discovered a combination of keys that would give you all the pass cards, which you normally had to collect painstakingly. She never told me what it was, though.

>> She discovered a combination of keys...
She never told me what it was, though. <<

From the mouths of babes.



~jwf~

PS:
Is anyone willing to satisfy my curiosity about
this Gr key? There is no Gr key on my keyboard.

I have one to the right of the space bar, it says alt gr on it.

Mine doesn't either. All i've got is an alt button either side of the space bar.

Perhaps American keyboards don't have an Alt Gr key.

Well what happens if you hold down the alt key on the RIGHT of the space bar, and then hit left/right arrow?

I have an American keyboard?

No wonder it keeps jumping to US English


lil xx

Without the alt gr key I couldn't type @ € {[]}\

OMG (sorry) my Alt key on the right does says AltCar.

Never noticed that before. Not Gr but AltCar.

Maybe that's the one I keep grazing that's been causing
all my non-alpha keys to become alternative characters.

Sometimes for no reason, all the < ~ ? : \ / > and other
symbol keys become something else. And I have to reboot
to get things back to normal.

Surely AltCar doesn't mean Alternate Characters?


~jwf~

That reminds me. Normal keyboards abbreviate Control to Ctrl, but I used to have a keyboard where it was abbreviated as Cntl.

"I did something with some of those keys the other day, I had to switch the machine off and start again. They are dangerous if you don't know what you're doing" [Lanzababy]

At one time or another, I think we *all* accidentally press some wrong keys or combinations thereof. There is no "Alt Gr" key on my keyboard. There are, however, a number of keys that I have never used, not even accidentally ["Prt Scr/Sys Rq," for instance], and I'dlike to dump one of them. In its place I would put "restore," to put your system back where it was before you hitthose disastrous keys.

Print screen can be quite handy, if you want to 'copy' what's on your screen at any given moment.

You just hit 'print screen', then paste into Word or Excel and it magically appears.

Not for every day use, perhaps, but it has its moments.

Alt + PrtScr is a very useful combination - it copies a picture of your current window. Try it, then open a Word Document and Paste (Ctrl-V)