If only Windows were like Cary Grant
Cary Grant once said “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.”.
The appositely named Sublime Text editor dutifully steps up to the mark. For my sins, I have been formatting Terms and Conditions (Lord knows, they must have been terrible). I have never quite learned regular expressions, so the column and multiple select features are an absolute boon.
I also discovered wrapping text with custom tags: simply make a selection, alt+shift+w and type the tag. For splitting the selection into multiple lines, hit ctrl+shift+L. This may sound gobbledygook, so I made a little video to demonstrate.
Sublime Text multiple select in action
It’s the attention to detail that I find striking: if you have made multiple selections, you can use the cursor keys to move the multiple cursors in sync. Mental, as the kidz say.
Turning to Windows 7, I am mostly satisfied and very occasionally extremely irritated. For example, why no tabbed browsing in Windows Explorer? Gnome has had this for years. And if you click on a shortcut in the Explorer Bar, you are whisked away from the shortcut to the original file, which means you have to traverse your way back up to your shortcuts. Aargh.
Software should stay out of your way until you need it. That includes functionality and screen estate. So why oh why in Windows 7, when you make the taskbar small does the Windows icon stay at the same size like a congealed lump of shining candy, actually obscuring the document you’re working on? Something to do with marketing perhaps? This annoyed me so much I made a screengrab:
One small reason why Windows annoys me
Individually, these gripes aren’t that important, and most people will put up with a lot of niggling annoyances in a resigned fashion with a shrug of the shoulders. I say, don’t. Fix the niggles (eg use the Windows Classic theme to get rid of the congealed candy effect), and if you can’t fix ’em, jump ship to another operating system. Like, just for example, Linux Mint using the Cinnamon desktop. Just saying.