Windows software often confounds me
Posted on October 20, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 83 views |
All day long I work in two worlds: Mac on my laptop and Windows on my desktop and often I can transition between the two seamlessly, I rarely think about it at all anymore.
But sometimes on the Windows side I’ll stumble across something that makes me stop, think “WTF?”, and then turn back to my trusty Mac for reassurance that everything is all right in the worlf of computing.
Today I’m going to rant about Dreamweaver on Windows:
I use Dreamweaver for coding ASP. For the most part it works pretty well. So why, someone tell me why, does Select All (Control-A) change the viewing position of the window I’m working in? Hit Ctrl-A and no matter where you are in a document you’ll find yourself staring at the very first line of your document with everything selected.
Ny non-scientific polling, accurate to +/- 0%, seems to indicate that this is the desired behaviour exactly 0% of the time. Why? Because 99% of the time I hit Ctrl-A by accident when I’m typing too fast and missed Ctrl-S by a fraction of a centimeter. That other 1% of the time: never have I wanted to suddenly be looking at the very first line of code I wrote. Ever.
A couple times a day, every day, I experience this internal conversation:
“That ought to do it. Time to save.”
(Fingers hit Ctrl-S and also clumsily strike Ctrl-A at the same time)
“Aww shit, now where was I?”
And amusingly enough, because text selection affects insertion point, there’s no convenient way to just jump back to where you were. Hit an arrow key and you’re either at the first character of the page or the last. Type something and you wipe out everything you’ve done. Click the mouse and the insertion point moves to where you’ve just clicked.
To quote Eddie Murphy: “Haha, very funny motherfucker.”