|
|
|
working differently from the expected way
Friday, December 14 2018
As you may recall, I've been using Sublime Text 3 (a proprietary, closed-source program) as my text editor of choice while working on a new Electron app I am migrating from the original Python. I'd tried using the open-source Atom text editor, but found the latency too aggravating when the CPU demands on Bunny, my workplace laptop, grew high. Atom is still a useful text editor, especially for viewing and making small edits to code, so I've been using it to look at (and make test changes to) the original Python code. This setup is pretty good, but I'm still having some nagging issues due to discrepancies between the way I work and the way both Atom and Sublime Text assume that I do. The problem is a feature called "multi-select," and both editors have it enabled by default. The idea behind multi-select is that the person making edits to a document (code or otherwise) can drop multiple cursors in a document and then type something, whereupon the thing typed appears simultaneously at all the places where a cursor is blinking. If this sounds awesome to you, perhaps you haven't considered how easy it is to accidentally open multiple cursors in a document. I find myself doing it constantly, only because I tend to still be leaning on the keyboard's control button as I click somewhere with the mouse. That just happens to be how a second, third, or Nth cursor is created, and all attempts to disable this command sequence in both programs have been fruitless. Web searches haven't been helpful, and I've mostly ended up on message boards where people making the complaints I do are told that they're using the program wrong and that multiple cursors are a huge feature. But I've been unable to train myself not to lean on the control key in the normal course of code editing. It's so ingrained in the way I edit that I don't even notice I'm doing it; it's part of the muscle memory of my hands to work this way. I think what's going on is that I make heavy use of the keyboard equivalents for copy and paste as I work; this keeps me from making typos with variable names (and, in English texts such as this one, with long names). So it's common to be still leaning on the control key as I go from the C to the V and click with the mouse, mostly because up until text editors assigned a purpose to control-click, there was no penalty for doing so. I get the feeling that my copy-paste-heavy technique is not a common method of text editing, so Sublime and Atom feel no obligation to accommodate it. Amusingly, the problem that multiple cursors is trying to solve, getting identical text in multiple places at once, is the same one I solve with copying and pasting. The difference is that one has to plan ahead with multiple cursors and get cursors going in all the places where some identical text needs to be typed, and then the operation is over. With copying and pasting, one can do it as needed and then add whole new blocks of code and resume, pasting in the variable names from a known trusted source elsewhere in the code.
All this is background for saying that I really tried hard today to at least get Sublime Text 3 to not use multiple cursors. I even tried installing a different version found on The Pirate Bay, but I was unsuccessful. So my code continues to be haunted by the very real possibility that I've accidentally double-typed some things in multiple places, all but one of which will have injected unnecessary errors.
[REDACTED]I got up from my desk on two occasions to go outside. The outdoors was cold, but, with temperatures in the 40s, warmer than it had been, and it felt good. I went behind the building and would've gone into the field back there. But, freakishly, there was already someone back there using a plastic bag to collect something (rosehips being the only commodity I'd seen back there). I'd never seen another human there before, and I was in no mood to see one there then. So I stayed away. Being alone was part of the reason I'd left the office. But not having anywhere else to go, I eventually returned to my desk. [REDACTED] So I got up again, and this time I did go into that rosehip field back behind the building. And I wasn't back there long before I saw whoever it was I'd seen earlier. The person still carried a white plastic bag and was harvesting something, though by then this forager was about a quarter mile away. Still, I most definitely wanted to avoid an encounter with him or her. So I went into the strip of woods between my office building and the rosehip field. I sat down on the forest floor and did my best to think calming thoughts. This seemed to work, and within five minutes or so I was feeling better. But weird things continued happening in my world. The rosehip gatherer had seemed like a vision out of a tussin trip, and then, after I got to my feet, I came upon a strange aluminum cylinder on a thick aluminum axis just lying there randomly (and inappropriately) in the forest like part of a crashed weather satellite. That's the kind of thing I live for finding, but I was in no mood to enjoy it then.
When I returned to my desk a second time, I was feeling good enough to wade back into my coding project. By 4:00pm, it was clear I was returning to normal. And by 4:30pm, I had my mental shit together enough to expand the memory of Hyrax, my workplace Elitebook 2740p, from 6 to 8 gigabytes. In so doing, I dropped a tiny screw that required a couple of my colleagues to recover. That was an accident, but perhaps I should engineer little team-building events like this on a regular basis.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181214 feedback
previous | next |
