Can we please stop being nerds and geeks and just pretend to be like a normal user?
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It is actually a very common typing error. I haven't yet seen a spelling checker that does not consider flipping character pairs in attempts to get a match in the dictionary.
Very common. In my college days, I created a shortcut for the VAX VMS editors to swap two characters. This predates all of the code completion intellisense stuff that makes coding so much easier now.* Eclipse has great templates and "quick fixes" for just about every common Java structure. * You still have to know what you want. We had one programmer straight out of school that would randomly accept ANY offered code completion.
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If I remember right, Brief was (or maybe still is) the only editor with a separate command for shifting the two last written characters (Ctrl-B?) The creator must have had big problems with that. :)
Leslie Nielsen: We're sorry to bother you at such a time like this, Mrs. Twice. We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn't dead then.
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dandy72 wrote:
I want precise control over where those individual styles start and finish
If you use styles, rather than the blunderbuss toolbar buttons, you get that. If you have to insert tags, you not only make it harder to check the text for errors, but you make it more work, and have to keep distracting yourself from the content you're trying to write, just to insert the tags. Selecting the text to modify and clicking the required style in the Styles pane is the most efficient (and least distracting) method. If you find you're picking up unwanted paragraph tags and spaces in Word, turn off the smart paragraph selection and select whole words options, which are stupidly on by default. BTW, if you find that a style is going onto the next line in Word (which it shouldn't, if you select the text without picking up the paragraph character), just select the new line and hit Ctrl+Space.
dandy72 wrote:
Isn't that going against the very thing Marc is complaining about?
Your preference of having to set <I></I> tags is what Marc appears not to like.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Mark_Wallace wrote:
Your preference of having to set <I></I> tags is what Marc appears not to like.
My preference is actually to *not* have them visible, but I do want the *option* to be able to view them when the editor isn't doing what I want it to do. A style viewer that shows me what style is in effect at the current location doesn't cut it - I want to see exactly where the tags start and end. In an ideal world, we'd be WYSIWYG all the way and never need to care about the underpinnings.
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Very common. In my college days, I created a shortcut for the VAX VMS editors to swap two characters. This predates all of the code completion intellisense stuff that makes coding so much easier now.* Eclipse has great templates and "quick fixes" for just about every common Java structure. * You still have to know what you want. We had one programmer straight out of school that would randomly accept ANY offered code completion.
I believe that the Vax had a CPU instruction for swapping bytes (and for swapping halfwords as well). I wonder if that instruction was ever used for correcting this kind of typing error. (The instructions, in particular the halfword swap, was made for handling certain legacy PDP-11 formats, where 32 bit fields were stored with the two 16 bit PDP words in the opposite order of a Vax 32 bit word.
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Yay! BRIEF! I miss it.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
I miss BRIEF, too. There's nothing like hammering out code in a hurry in a MsDOS application once you get the quirky keyboard mapping embedded into your brain. I'm probably the last guy on the planet that misses WordStar, too. ;) There are some BRIEF re-creations out there, but Notepad++ works well for me with lots more support than BRIEF ever had. BTW, remember when MS Excel and Word used to be fairly snappy? Now the latest iterations of these products seem so "leisurely" when typing, not enough to slow my work but text appears on the screen slower than on old machines with slower CPUs.
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I miss BRIEF, too. There's nothing like hammering out code in a hurry in a MsDOS application once you get the quirky keyboard mapping embedded into your brain. I'm probably the last guy on the planet that misses WordStar, too. ;) There are some BRIEF re-creations out there, but Notepad++ works well for me with lots more support than BRIEF ever had. BTW, remember when MS Excel and Word used to be fairly snappy? Now the latest iterations of these products seem so "leisurely" when typing, not enough to slow my work but text appears on the screen slower than on old machines with slower CPUs.
No, your not! I use the WordStar control sequences daily. I have an AutoHotKey script that makes all my editors/IDEs/word processors use the Wordstar control sequences. I also use an old ZDNET utility called TradeKeys to remap the CAP LOCK key as the control key. Heh, nobody at work likes trying to use the editors on my machine.
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I used to use Ctrl-T in the EVE* editor on VMS to do the same thing. I can't remember if it was a default command or an extension I added. * EVE stood for Extensible Vax Editor and was written in language named VaxTPU (or just TPU - Text Processing Utility) and I added lots of 'useful' features!
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No, your not! I use the WordStar control sequences daily. I have an AutoHotKey script that makes all my editors/IDEs/word processors use the Wordstar control sequences. I also use an old ZDNET utility called TradeKeys to remap the CAP LOCK key as the control key. Heh, nobody at work likes trying to use the editors on my machine.
:-D
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Mark_Wallace wrote:
Your preference of having to set <I></I> tags is what Marc appears not to like.
My preference is actually to *not* have them visible, but I do want the *option* to be able to view them when the editor isn't doing what I want it to do. A style viewer that shows me what style is in effect at the current location doesn't cut it - I want to see exactly where the tags start and end. In an ideal world, we'd be WYSIWYG all the way and never need to care about the underpinnings.
Then use a text editor and a mark-up language. The point about WySiWyG is that you can actually see when a style starts and ends -- but if you have a habit of sometimes applying styles to blankspaces, you won't know whether a leading or trailing blankspace has a style applied to it or not without selecting it and looking at the styles gallery (which should always be visible) -- unless the style coincides with one of the blunderbuss-button styles, in which case the button will be active. Full word-processor WySiWyG, with all the options you can apply to blocks, is too complicated for a simple tagging solution, so showing all tags (which you can see in plain text by opening a FrameMaker Mif file, for example) can make a single page immensely long, and you'll have to hunt for your text -- which is one of the reasons why WordPerfect and other simple-tagging word processors sadly fell by the wayside; they couldn't add all the features that other word processors could add easily, while maintaining any kind of stability and usability. I just remoted to one of my machines that has a Framemaker license, and can confirm that the Mif file for a one-page WySiWyG file (which is part of a 19-page document) is 29,712 lines long (and Mif files have only one blank line, with a REM character at position 1). Even if you strip out all the Mif data that isn't actually used in the file, you're left with a pretty damned huge file, using simple tagging.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Markdown: To force a line return, place two empty spaces at the end of a line. It's enough to deal with * and ** and # and ## and ### and 1. and 1. and 1. and all the other stupid things about markdown, including the inconsistencies from site to site. Seriously BitBucket and the rest that think markdown is the cat's meow rather than... You can't just use one of the dozens of free, open source WYSIWYG editors out there? I know, I've ranted about this before. But it's our fault. We love this symbol soup. It's the geek version of the manager's buzzword bingo, and no better. And I don't love it. When I use an editor, I don't want to be in "ooh, look, shiny symbols that mean things" geek mode. I want to be in "user mode" -- Give me a decent editor!!!
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