You're quite right. It's almost unusable on Windows in its default configuration.
I particularly like how difficult it is to toggle full-screen playback with the keyboard. F11 makes it full screen, but doesn't hide the controls. Ctrl-H hides the controls, but also disables keyboard shortcuts!
So now, when you want to get out of full-screen mode, you have to know that you need to press Esc followed by F11. Not even double-click gets you back to windowed mode.
This kind of asymmetric mode toggling drives me up the walls. That, and the fact it doesn't pause when you click the video.
This must be some new weird change with the most recent version. The version I use has F as the fullscreen button, and either F or ESC will exit fullscreen. And the controls auto-hide.
No, F11 is the only way documented in the menu to get full-screen playback. F is not documented anywhere in the player UI; instead, it's buried away in the keybinding section of the preferences. The whole point of showing accelerators in the menu is to enable keyboard shortcuts for frequent commands to be learned; that VLC doesn't do this consistently is, alone, an indictment of its UI.
F11 and Alt-Enter are generally the two idioms for getting full-screen behaviour on Windows. Both work in Media Player Classic. Alt-Enter comes from the old DOS box from Windows 3; I'm not sure, but I think IE 4 pioneered F11. In any case, F11 works with Firefox, Chrome and IE; Alt-Enter also works with IE, Mintty, etc.
Nop. 2.0.5 here (2.0.8 is the latest) and f works just fine. I guess barrkel had enough time to whine on a forum but not enough to look in the program's preferences.
I particularly like how difficult it is to toggle full-screen playback with the keyboard. F11 makes it full screen, but doesn't hide the controls. Ctrl-H hides the controls, but also disables keyboard shortcuts!
So now, when you want to get out of full-screen mode, you have to know that you need to press Esc followed by F11. Not even double-click gets you back to windowed mode.
This kind of asymmetric mode toggling drives me up the walls. That, and the fact it doesn't pause when you click the video.