I’d love to love to
There are all kinds of great software tools out there that I don’t use, and it annoys the crap out of me.
Emacs does all kinds of everything and I don’t use 1% of it’s functionality.
There are tools like Ubiquity, Launchy, and Compendium. Even on the geekery side there are new (and just new to me) languages that look juicy and wonderful. I can’t go to lifehacker without drooling over all the cool tools.
But somewhere along the line I stopped rolling up my sleeves and diving in to these things. I think the last technology I sank my teeth into really was python, and that’s because it was job required. I’ve since been using it for my generic scripting needs all over.
And last night the plainly obvious thing hit me: None of these things serve a perceived need.
Design patterns were required as I was coming into my own as a C++ programmer.
Perl was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to learn, because I’m a C++ programmer.
I gleefully spent hours in my .emacs file farting around with lisp code to get (x|nt)?emacs to work exactly how I wanted it on all platforms without modification (then mac went and fucked that all up, for which I will never forgive them.) Why? Because it did things I needed done and did them with spectacular aplomb.
Greasemonkey’s wonderful and can do all KINDS of awesome stuff. Yeah I’ve got a couple stupid url xform scripts in there. Meh.
But ubiquity? Sure, the demo seems cool and I’ll bet I’d really like it if I got used to it. But there’s absolutely nothing pushing me towards it.
Compendium? Yep. It’s really cool. There’s a nearly obscene amount of functionality at your finger tips in a smooth and intuitive enough way that it might have induced me to abandon my various outliner projects. But… eh, I don’t really need it. outline-mode in xemacs works beautifully. Sure it’s not as polished as it could be, but I don’t much care. Polish rarely comes without a fairly extreme cost.
Launchy? How about “windows key” then start typing? Ok, so you can add your own commands. Cool. I’ve got it loaded and running but I’m never more than 1 key away from a launch bar or 1 key + “cmd<enter>” away from a shell. explain to me what I need launchy for again?
Look, I have NOTHING bad to say about any of these apps. Nothing. In fact, they’re all pretty cool things that I want to have at my finger tips. I think in the long run they’d integrate in a time/effort saving way… probably.
But I’m at a point where things really are good enough almost across the board. It’s pretty annoying frankly. I used to think I was just mentally calcifying. But I realized that I’ve solved just about all of the usability problems I had.
Tags: Programming