The importance of being earnestly consistent

I have been munching my way through a stack of HTML files of late, wishing I had learnt Regular Expressions in kindergarten, or at least having the RegEx "Bible" on my bookshelf. So much repetition, so much time...

The silver lining is that I've spent a lot of time with the Geany text editor, jazzing up my snippets, trimming my keybindings. And what I did learn was the importance of being earnestly consistent.

Just a couple of times, a repeated behaviour resulted in ever-so-slightly different outcomes (the cursor was on the line above). It was most likely user-error and I couldn't replicate it later but it reminded me of the reasons for my long-lasting hate-hate relationship with Microsoft Word. Essentially, do the same thing twice and a totally different outcome would occur (usually to do with styling text).

Even if a software workflow is clunky and awkward, if it has the same outcome, you can get used to it. But if it isn't consistent, then "Hello @!:"*&$&"!