Flutterby™! : Emacs mappings for VS? 2002-07-16 23:43:03+00

Emacs mappings for VS?

2002-07-16 23:43:03+00 by Dan Lyke 13 comments

Visual C++ used to have an Epsilon keyboard mapping that didn't tie my fingers into knots when I switched between it and Emacs. I can't find anything that indicates custom key mappings are even possible in Visual Studio .NET, and given how tightly coupled the code and the forms editor are, it's hard to switch back and forth. Anyone got a line on custom keymappings for Visual Studio .NET? While looking for that, I found a list of fun warm fuzzy things about Microsoft: "That which does not kill you only sets you up for the next thing to reduce you to tears."

Yunno, it's interesting - I never particularly thought of myself as a Windows defender, having run screaming from it into the welcoming arms of Macs and Unix machines after a multi-year stint as a 3.1 programmer. But when I look at that list of fun warm fuzzy things, I find myself getting defensive.

- Outlook sucks. We all know Outlook sucks polymorphously and definitively and qualitatively. The people who submit things to that list don't sound particularly clueless to me. So why are they still using Outlook at all?

- Microsoft dev environments and compilers suck. They always have. And they are the only game in town. This tends to be the rule for compilers maintained by the same people who make the OS - the Sun 'cc' is famously rotten. Not that I'm not sympathetic, but this ain't news and griping about it will not induce M$ to change it one whit. They can work internally with crap dev tools because they wrote the tools and they know where all the shaky bits are and how to avoid them.

- Many of the GUI gripes are gripes that sound to me like they are from Unixheads who don't like using ANY GUI, even a good GUI, to do certain things (like file management). I agree that sometimes it's nice to be able to go to a command line and just type what you want to do, but in terms of GUI I have learned (to my surprise) that I like the way Windows does it, in many respects, more than a Mac.

I don't think I've been in a situation with the WinME version of the File Manager (excuse me, Explorer) where I expected it to do one thing and it did something annoyingly different. It does crash a lot, especially when using Thumbnail View heavily for lots of images, but it's a pretty nondestructive crash - just closes the affected window without hurting anything else. On a Mac, if Finder goes down, the whole thing goes down.

I agree that I would like more low-level customization abilities, like turning off a lot of the "Are you sure you want to do that?" type messages.

- I came to Internet Explorer late in the game, having basically boycotted it for several years and expecting to hate it. I don't. I use it for all my home browsing now. I understand that this comes down to personal taste, and I agree that IE has quirks, but so does Netscape - in spades.

That said, I think that blurring the distinction between file manager and web browser was a BIG mistake, and I try to remake the distinction whenever possible. I like to handle local files one way and web content the other way, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for the horror stories that ensue when people mix and match.

I don't like M$ - they are big, slow, mean, callous, incompetent, and greedy. And I don't think Windows or any of the M$-written Windows software is as good as it could or should be. But I also don't believe in screaming too hard to change something that is clearly an immovable object. I'd rather find ways to identify the holes and either work around them or exploit them. And heaven knows there are plenty of holes there to find.

Sorry about that - not sure where this boiled up from, but apparently it's been brewing for a while.

This might only list the keybindings, but it might offer a chance to change 'em too. I've never seen VC++6 or VS.NET, of course, so I'm shooting rubber bands at the moon with this offering.

I also found this (search for "hooking command") but again, I've no idea about this stuff.

Tools, Options, Enviornment, Keyboard. Choose an existing keyboard mapping scheme, Save As to create a new copy, then customize your new copy. Load the new schema from there, or from Start Page, My Profile.

Unfortunately they don't seem to be shipping the Epsilon profile, though there may be someone out there who's already done the work.

a while back MS paid Borland 100 nillion for all their patents. They also hired Anders who wrote Delphi. C# is Delphi (Delphi is wonderful) with the names changed slightly. I forsee good things from MS in this, but I am having trouble with the MS 30 meg runtime to do stuff. Delphi allows remapping - remarkably similar to Mikes comments above. And Delphi gives you a nice little exe without the need for dll's hell...

Tahnks, Mike, I had found that setting, although it wasn't immediately obvious to me that "Save As..." was the way to create a new one, and thought I was mostly limited to those four initial options. I guess it's down to banging in the appropriate key mappings. Oh well.

C# (C octothorpe? C hash?) itself is actually waning on me. The forms environment is kinda cool, although really not all that advanced over the old dialog manager, but the language is like Java--, not low level enough to be a good C replacement, not high level enough to be as handy an interface prototyping system as Perl/Tk. But it might grow on me, especially as I get more facile at passing data and control flow back and forth between real C++ and C#.

Oh yeah: Todd, all software sucks, Visual Studio and Outlook are both software, ergo.... And I've never gotten Sun's workshop to run reasonably on any machine I've tried to use it on, so this is obviously not a problem limited to Microsoft, it's just that Microsoft's products usually manage to suck in new and innovative ways. Exploder must be completely a personal taste thing, one mistyped domain name, and after 5 minutes trying to regain control of my machine from the exploding JavaScript problem I'm willing to tolerate Mozilla. The only thing I'll use IE for is getting Windows updates.

I don't have those sorts of IE explosions, Dan, but otherwise, yeah, what you said. Sorry to have dropped in that enormous and not-very-germane rant.

I actually understand your frustration with the Microsoft bashing. Having done a little user support in the past few days I understand even more clearly that most of my frustration from Microsoft software comes from the fact that I am distinctly not in the class of person that Microsoft considers a customer, so any comments I might have on those products are roughly as relevant as my critiques of the Wal*Mart or Neiman Marcus customer experience. Although there's a guy on the fringes of my social circle out here who's a host at Neiman Marcus

, and if I could spend any amount of money to look as good as he does I would; but I think appearances like that are more due to time spent on working out and grooming and some spectacular genetics than clothing and accoutrements.

Todd; I am with you 110% on the File Manager/Explorer issue. But I think we're not the norm - especially among computer professionals. I hang out on some company newsgroups where everybody seems to feel that any kind of tree-based UI comes directly from the anti-christ. And on Linux there seem to only be two camps: Those who despise GUIs of any kind and those who want to webify everything. I was really upset when RedHat dropped gmc (which was very much like Explorer) in favor of Nautilus (yuck!).

I've done my share of MS bashing, but I tend to do it like MS insiders/employees do. I generally don't dislike them as a company. It's [most of] their products that I don't like. And I don't like it when stupid focus groupies have too much influence over product features and design. Like Dan, I become less and less their target customer every day - and that irritates me.

I'll agree that IE usage is a personal taste thing. I don't use it because of security issues (which, yes, are eventually and mostly fixed), because I don't like their mechanism for storing bookmarks and cookies (one file per? yuck!) and because, like I've found with most MS products, each new version continues to remove more and more of the ability to customize and fine-tune to my tastes.

Today I spent my second day at the GIS Lab at UTC. I'm the new hired geek to solve their problems. First on the table: ArcGIS bombs when it tries to print large maps to their new $10K poster printer. ArcGIS is a wonderful concept that, unfortunately, someone high up in the developer management bought into the Microsoft thing ages ago. Now it struggles with big files, the user interface flakes out, etc., etc. The biology grad students I support keep asking me questions like 'what does unknown program error mean?'.

I think I've fixed the printer problem by installing the Adobe Universal PostScript driver. Unfortunately, HP doesn't make a PPD for the HP DesignJet 800. I used the DJ750C PPD successfully today and found a hacked PPD from the Mac on another site. If this doesn't work, I'll probably stick a Linux box in between so I can take apart the PostScript as it comes through.

The machine printing the job is a Win2K Pro P4 1.7Ghz with 1GB of RAM and about 40GB of free disk space. I had to crank the Virtual Memory up to 8GB to calm down the system. The printer has a 6GB hard drive in it, but I'm sure an uncompressed image of what needs to print is bigger than that. 42"x60" with ArcGIS generating shaded 3D.

This stuff is beautiful and amazingly useful when it works but it's really pushing the boundaries of what Windows likes to do comfortably.

Well, I've spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to use resources effectively under C#, and I can say definitively that the old method sucked a lot less. When the "Solution Explorer" lets you add a file that apparently then has to be processed by various command line facilities, you know you're in trouble...

Hm. What are you trying to do with resources - localize the form UI, or something else?