programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
Leon Bambrick is full of good ideas. Like KeyTraino, for instance:
When you use the toolbar, the menus or the context-menus of an application, KeyTraino shows the alternative keystroke you could've used.
Evidently someone at SlickEdit is wearing a tinfoil hat that transmits at the same frequency as Leon's, because they just released a free set of Visual Studio 2005 add-ins that includes the KeyTraino feature:
The Command Spy monitors command execution and allows you to see exactly what commands you've run, how many times you've run them and what key bindings are used to invoke those commands. The main purpose of this tool is to allow you to learn what commands are bound to which keystrokes, so that you can work faster within the IDE.
And it works, too:
This very same add-in has a bunch of other features, too. It allows you to place the dancing banana (or any other graphic of your choice) in the editor pane of your IDE. No, I'm not kidding.
Now that's productivity.
Sweet, I've always wanted a dancing banana in my IDE! Now I wish that Xcode had that function. :(
;)
That's a rather cool idea, but I do wonder what the productivity increase would be? A couple of seconds maybe? Still going to give it a go, though.
Greg Poole on November 8, 2006 1:45 AMExcellent - I am all for fruit themed humor.
Peter Mescalchin on November 8, 2006 1:56 AMThat banana rocks. Totally!!!
Rad! on November 8, 2006 3:26 AMAlthough from the looks of that window, you're running on Vista.
So don't try the shortcut to enable debugging ;)
Peter Bridger on November 8, 2006 5:11 AMplz don't make fun of my SlickEdit. it's about the last industrial strength editor that does vi(m). wouldn't want them to feel picked on.
Buggy Fun Bunny on November 8, 2006 5:32 AMIt's peanut butter jelly time...
Scott Schecter on November 8, 2006 5:43 AMstrange that, based on the number of comments about it, the dancing banana seems to be the killer feature here. you'd think the other stuff would be kind of useful to?
and thanks for the link out jeff!
lb on November 8, 2006 5:47 AMAny bets on how long until Hanselman writes this up? Wonder if he'll consider turning the banana on for Zenzo?
Brian on November 8, 2006 6:26 AMPeanut butter jelly with a baseball bat!
steve harman on November 8, 2006 6:54 AMI just installed the SlickEdit tools, and they were nothing but buggy. I kept getting those "Visual Studio has encountered an error"-type messages, and it would lock up occasionally when I was doing something totally benign, like pasting in an XML file. Didn't try the SLOC thing or the object browser (I was just trying to get stuff done without a lockup), and the indentation marker is neat but isn't all that useful since VS (like any modern code editor) does all your indenting automagically.
The install doesn't include any mechanism for bug reporting, and after 2 minutes of browsing their site I didn't find any such link. So, I uninstalled it, and I won't bother looking at their premium products anytime soon.
JesterXXV on November 8, 2006 7:03 AMDancing banana! I NEED this plugin.
Taylor on November 8, 2006 9:19 AMIt's peanut butter jelly time...
Tarkin on November 8, 2006 12:32 PMA dancing banana? Best...plugin...ever!
[ICR] on November 8, 2006 12:34 PMSo, how long until a plugin that analyzes the code you are writing and suggests more idiomatic solutions?
'That function seems very similar to Utils.FixBrokenSpork. Click here for more'.
'That loop iterates over the contents of a list the long way - "foreach (type x) in list" is a common simple way. Click here to rewrite your function'
Visual Studio can already parse the code for highlighting, Intellisense and refactoring...
Forget the dancing Banana you need admiral Ackbar.
And when you get a build error just think
"Thats things not operational yet!"
This is so cool it even works in my Fortran editor !
Fabrulana on November 9, 2006 3:00 AMstrange... can't you people write your own plug in? I can't... I'm still studying... :D
You could put something like a dancing "idunnowhatthehellyouwant".
Honestly? It can put the dancing banana in my Emacs editor? This I gotta see...
T.E.D. on November 9, 2006 6:26 AMA good productivity plug in is Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software.
http://www.wholetomato.com/
I have been using it for a while and really like it.
It has a lot good features.
Multilanguage support – C++, .Net etc
Vastly improved intellisense
Autotext (improved version of code sippets)
Smart file opener
Improved Code colorizer
Improved symbol search (beats the pants off Find in Files)
Improved refactoring
Good support ( they answer their Support Forum posts )
Yeah yeah I know it sounds like a sales pitch, but I have been developing with it for a while and have noticed productivity gains.
Hi, I'm one of the developers from SlickEdit that worked on Gadgets. First, I want to say thanks to all the people who have tried it out, especially those that commented on it.
I also wanted to respond to JesterXXV's post... we're sorry that you had a bad experience with Gadgets and would be very interested in hearing more about what went wrong. There is an "About..." menu item which brings up the information about Gadgets and links to our forums, where you can post bugs. (http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?board=3.0)
We did release a new version last night (11/8 3:30pm est) with a handful of fixes. We haven't had anyone complain of lockups or crashes, though, so we'd be very interested to hear more information about what you saw.
Thanks again to everyone who has taken it for a spin!
SlickEdit Inc on November 9, 2006 6:43 AMI say we change the captcha from orange to banana here.
Say, on that topic, what is the point of a static captcha anyways?
I wonder if you could get the banana to dance by syntax errors... Hmmm..
Xepol on November 9, 2006 6:54 AMOr the guy from the Muppets and have it play the "Manamana" song too!
Tim on November 9, 2006 10:31 AMI just downloaded SlickEdit Gadgets, and installed on my corporate PC with Visual Studio 2005. I had the same bad luck as JesterXXV - "Visual Studio has encountered an error... Check the box to restart Visual Studio..." I uninstalled SlickEdit Gadgets and the errors stopped.
I find it unbelievable when "SlickEdit Inc" on November 9, 2006 06:43 AM says that "we haven't had anybody complain of lockups or crashes..." Then he expects us to gather and forward debugging info. Test your own stuff sparky.
MAYBE (just maybe) you guys haven't heard about these issues, but I doubt that. If you have not, then it just means that most developers won't waste any more time complaining about a broken piece of junk that was free anyway. It already screwed me by wasting my time on install and uninstall. What possible satisfaction can I expect by complaining to the guys who couldn't debug their product in the first place?
I got what I paid for, and I'm done with SlickEdit tools. Thanks for nothing.
I tried to use a free productivity tool, and it sabotaged my productivity for 1/3 of a day. Nice.
CaptWillard on March 13, 2007 11:21 AMI think you just found the greatest advancement on keeping your sanity.
Brandon on February 6, 2010 9:51 PMI'll pimp Visual Assist too. I've used it for C++ for years now, and I'm absolutely lost without it.
It takes a bit of getting used to, and it doesn't always get its suggestions right, but it's still really great. "Goto method" (Alt+G), "Find method in current file" (Alt+M) and "open file in workspace" (Shift+Alt+O) are just so handy it's untrue, even if you're no big fan of the intellisense enhancements.
It also turns "." into "-" when you type it after the name of something that's a pointer. I don't even want to think about how many keypresses this has saved me.
Tom Seddon on February 6, 2010 9:51 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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