Saturday 18 April, 2009

Too many editors drive you crazy

We like to get used to things we do. Like using a text editors. Most of us are so used to using editors with GUI that after every few lines we mechanically press Ctrl+S to save our work. However, It becomes a real PITA if we are forced to use different editors with totally different shortcuts.

I have ended up in a very frustrating situation. I used vim for some basic shell script editing (especially when connected through ssh). For all my local work I used Kate or Kdevelop (KDE IDE), both of which are pretty standard when it comes to shortcuts (so Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Ctrl-S works). These days I have been using MATLAB a lot and that too using X11 tunneling :-( Although basic MATLAB editor is standard, the one which uses X11 tunneling has a totally different (and weird) shortcuts. For example, to save, you have to use (Ctrl-X Ctrl-S) and to copy Alt-W while (Ctrl-W) and (Ctrl-Y) is for cut and paste respectively.

The problem comes when you get used to using all of them. Now I type :w in matlab and expect it to save stuff or (Ctrl-x, Ctrl-s) in kate and wonder why did it cut the selected text.

It looks like even though this is exagerrated, it is not very far from truth :-) User interfaces do have profound impact on the way you do work ...

3 comments:

SEV said...

Umm.. by default MATLAB on Linux uses Emacs shortcuts. Goto File > Preferences and change the Editor preferences to Windows.
Ta da!

Alok said...

Geez ..
I should have guessed that. But anyways I never liked emacs either. Will surely try your suggestion some time Thanks.

Alok said...

SEV,

I did not see the option to change Editor to "Windows" It does have a field to specify third party editor but it had no effect whatsoever :-(