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Yay! BRIEF! I miss it.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I too did miss it for several years - but Notepad++ isn't too bad as a Windows replacement.
(I never tried any Windows version of Brief)
If I'm not mistaken, the Brief installation floppy is still down in my basement. But is it readable? If it is, will Brief run in a command.exe window? And wasn't that installation floppy a 5.25" one? Then I would have to fire up that old Win98 machine as well (for 3,5" floppies I have a USB drive ... but modern Windows refuse to read floppies without a proper format code in the boot sector, so sometimes I have to fire up Win98 for those).
Maybe I will spend this weekend to see if I can get Brief on the air again!
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I miss BRIEF, too. There's nothing like hammering out code in a hurry in a MsDOS application once you get the quirky keyboard mapping embedded into your brain. I'm probably the last guy on the planet that misses WordStar, too.
There are some BRIEF re-creations out there, but Notepad++ works well for me with lots more support than BRIEF ever had.
BTW, remember when MS Excel and Word used to be fairly snappy? Now the latest iterations of these products seem so "leisurely" when typing, not enough to slow my work but text appears on the screen slower than on old machines with slower CPUs.
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No, your not! I use the WordStar control sequences daily. I have an AutoHotKey script that makes all my editors/IDEs/word processors use the Wordstar control sequences. I also use an old ZDNET utility called TradeKeys to remap the CAP LOCK key as the control key. Heh, nobody at work likes trying to use the editors on my machine.
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If I remember right, Brief was (or maybe still is) the only editor with a separate command for shifting the two last written characters (Ctrl-B?)
The creator must have had big problems with that.
Leslie Nielsen:
We're sorry to bother you at such a time like this, Mrs. Twice. We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn't dead then.
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It is actually a very common typing error. I haven't yet seen a spelling checker that does not consider flipping character pairs in attempts to get a match in the dictionary.
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Very common. In my college days, I created a shortcut for the VAX VMS editors to swap two characters.
This predates all of the code completion intellisense stuff that makes coding so much easier now.*
Eclipse has great templates and "quick fixes" for just about every common Java structure.
- You still have to know what you want. We had one programmer straight out of school that would randomly accept ANY offered code completion.
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I believe that the Vax had a CPU instruction for swapping bytes (and for swapping halfwords as well). I wonder if that instruction was ever used for correcting this kind of typing error. (The instructions, in particular the halfword swap, was made for handling certain legacy PDP-11 formats, where 32 bit fields were stored with the two 16 bit PDP words in the opposite order of a Vax 32 bit word.
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Emacs used to have something similar, Ctrl-T and stood for 'twiddle'
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I used to use Ctrl-T in the EVE* editor on VMS to do the same thing. I can't remember if it was a default command or an extension I added.
* EVE stood for Extensible Vax Editor and was written in language named VaxTPU (or just TPU - Text Processing Utility) and I added lots of 'useful' features!
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sounds like a code project
Real programmers use butterflies
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What you are asking for, cannot easily be provided in a 7-bit-ASCII command shell. So in a Linux environment, it is DOA.
WYSIWYG is for sissies. If you can't handle ed, you don't belong.
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Member 7989122 wrote: If you can't handle ed, you don't belong still way too interactive, a chain of sed commands with well crafted (and carefully double escaped) regex is all you need for most tasks, for anything longer there's cat.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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The only symbol soup i can tolerate is regex and that had to grow on me.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It only grew on me when I found Expresso[^] - it's free, and it examines and generates Regular expressions. It helps a lot, especially when you're doing some complex grouping.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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honey the codewitch wrote: regex and that had to grow on me.
I can't imagine a worse fate.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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haha but they're so bloody useful. A compact way of representing little state machines.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: I can't imagine a worse fate An infestation of VB6 ?
(Hope that didn't make you wet yourself in horror).
Ravings en masse^ |
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: An infestation of VB6 ?
The end of all days is here!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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honey the codewitch wrote: The only symbol soup i can tolerate is regex and that had to grow on me. Yeah, like the zombie climbing fungus[^].
It makes you keep climbing up and up and up to ridiculous heights of complexity until it explodes.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Because CRLF isn't easy enough.
I blame the web.
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If only WYSIWYG editors were smart enough, I'd agree.
But how many times have you used, say, bold in [insert WYSIWYG editor of choice], did some more editing, then as you start typing on the next line, it starts with bold because you know that internally, the bold end tag got messed up and now follows the linefeed character instead of appearing before it. That sort of thing. Bullet-point lists with various indentation levels is the other thing that gets me. Once the indentation starts getting messed up, it becomes practically impossible to fix. Copy a multi-level bullet-point list from WordPad, paste it into Word or OneNote, do some more editing, then bring it back in the original app. You're lucky if nothing got messed up.
(Multiple) decades ago, WordPerfect got it right - it was a WYSIWYG editor, but gave you a "reveal codes" option. If the editor wasn't smart enough, you at least had the ability to go in and clean things up yourself and not have to pray it eventually understands what you meant all along.
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Never, ever, ever use bold, italic, etc. toolbar buttons to change styles.
If you want a different style, create the style, don't use the writing-to-granny-once-a-year buttons.
In dev terms: Create a class, rather than use VB-style methods.
That goes for bullets, numbered lists, etc, too (and never make a single-level list style -- go multi-level, every time, so you can just indent for the next level) It might be more work to set it up, but it saves you a shipload of hassle, and is easy to save as or export to a template.Quote: (Multiple) decades ago, WordPerfect got it right - it was a WYSIWYG editor, but gave you a "reveal codes" option I can't think of a word processor that doesn't have that. Reveal-formatting functions are usually more convenient, because they show you precisely what the formatting is, rather than just the codes (Shift + F1 in Word; menu options in more advanced WPs).
Oh, and if you're using Word, make Normal.dot(x) read-only, unless you actually want to make changes to the template.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Never, ever, ever use bold, italic, etc. toolbar buttons to change styles.
If you want a different style, create the style, don't use the writing-to-granny-once-a-year buttons.
Isn't that going against the very thing Marc is complaining about? If I want to put something in bold, I want a Bold button. Creating a style, as you're suggesting, is very much a developer thing and no mortal man on the street thinks in those terms or would even know what you're talking about. I'm talking about word processors and the like - not web page development tools...in which case I agree, this is what CSS is for.
Quote: (Shift + F1 in Word; menu options in more advanced WPs).
That shows you what style is currently in effect; I want precise control over where those individual styles start and finish. I've done that right now in CP's editor with 'I' tags in angled brackets. That's the sort of control I'd like to see in a WYSIWYG, if it's not going to get everything just right, all the time.
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