Am I the only one who really doesn't like having to prefix that symbol and never types bangs? I type faster than most other tech people but putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger is more trouble than adding a keyword for the search in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). Especially because I type the G, Y, and W (google, google-images, youtube, wikipedia... the thing you use this for) with my left hand as well.

Bangs are recommended almost every time ddg comes up, and I see people like my brother using them, so it seems like nobody else minds and the choice of symbol will never change. Am I alone in thinking it's one of the worst possible prefix characters?

I hate having to use a prefix at all. I set up my own custom search in chrome that points to my app that does specialized searches based on the first letter and then defaults to a regular DDG query. For example, e foo searches ebay for foo, a foo searches amazon, m 123 main searches maps.

> putting my whole left hand on the left side of the keyboard to press Shift with my pinky and 1 with my ring finger

Try using your right pinky to press shift when typing a bang.

If you want to just use one hand, try holding shift with pinky and hitting 1 with your middle finger. Slightly less stretching.

I might try the right shift, that's not a bad idea. Still the delay of a redirect, but might be useful when on mobile or when not using my own computer. Thanks for the suggestion!

> Try using your right pinky to press shift when typing a bang.

That's the way I do it, and I'd have thought the only way to do it.... you assign fingers to keys, and if you need the shifted key, you use the other hand to press shift and the original designated finger to hit the key itself. The way GP describes it sounds painful.

Middle finger stretch is what I do, haven't noticed it being a problem before but I'll pay attention from now on. Haven't really thought about it.

I had similar thoughts, and was pleased to find that the `!` prefix allows you to place the bang anywhere in the query so I tend to slip it in at the end (which feels more natural to me).

That’s an odd complaint when I first read it

Maybe it relates to hand pain and stuff

You could use right shift, also, though that’d be tricky for my brain

Maybe it helps to know that I'm a Vim user and I notice the difference it makes when having to move my hand to the mouse (or even the arrow/home/page-up keys) to position my cursor as opposed to using Vim key bindings?

Doing a ! doesn’t really shift much from home row positioning. Certainly not as much as arrow keys would

I do understand the thought though. After doing a few years on a mac and learning to love pushing cmd with my thumb, which was a lot of actions like cut copy paste and more, I began to hate if I had to use left pinky for anything ctrl related

Even on linux or windows today I’ll map ctrl directly left of spacebar so I can keep the same habit up

It’s naturally great for me in vim too, be it moving up and down the page with ^d and ^u or some custom ^ mapping, etc

I think if you're a heavy command line user or even programmer, you'll be having to do ! and ` and ~ and so on, meaning -- it's some pretty solid muscle memory

You can surely think of a better choice

,⟨prefix⟩ for example

Indeed, pretty much all of the pinky-operated non-dead symbols on the right would be better (so ,./;[]- primarily, maybe also = though that is further away, but not ' because for many people that's a dead key). The comma also universally works for German and French keyboards.

What are your most used bangs? Mine is !gi.