Being used to good software resulted in withdrawal symptoms
For those using a RSS reader, subscribe here: rss.xml
It has been over five years since I had to use Microsoft Windows as the main operating system. Since the start of september, I started using an office laptop with Windows 11 on it as they did not offer Linux laptops (yet). And I was missing quite a few settings that I became so used to that I did not give them a second thought.
Keyboard
When writing, I am way too used to the vim-style of editing; regardless of the editor I always bind the keys in that way. So the first muscle memory that lead to confusion made THE LETTERS LARGE AGAIN, nO Not LikE that, aah that was not the escape key. Because with this style of editing, you press the escape key a lot to switch modes. And as the caps lock key is quite accessible, you swap it with the escape key so that the escape key becomes accessible.
The second muscle memory that lead to confusion was the “élegant”, no…, “elegant” way of writing text with quotes. Right, I was used to using a compose key, but it is expected that you use a different locale that automatically composes. Which means that you have to remember to press the spacebar if the next character can be a composed with the previous character, fun!
What was even more fun, is that on this laptop the standard layout was the regular one, not the international one. So it did not compose at all, and I asked it to my coworkers. And they started rambling about alt-codes, looking up the character on the internet, or looking in the settings. One coworker said they did not write the characters at all, or used autocorrect. Eventually we got there, and I opened notepad to test it. And I noticed it had an AI in it, yikes.
I missed the compose key already, so I started looking for another solution. So many people said that I just have to get used to the compose-by-default way. Because I write quotation marks a lot when programming, and that would mean typing an extra space each time to cancel the compose.
Luckily I knew that Microsoft PowerToys exists, this was such a saver. It has the key swapping, and the Quick Accent utility that is more like a compose key. As a solution it is good enough, not that I type the accented characters that often anyways.