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Showing posts from July, 2011

Windows 7 hint of the day: Alt+Up is the new Backspace

Although in general I like what MS has done with Windows 7 (it genuinely is the best Windows so far), there is one constant gripe I have with Windows Explorer, that is they've "unified" the keybinding for Backspace to work just like in IE. That is - instead of navigating up one level in the filesystem hierarchy, it goes back in the navigation history. It is highly confusing, because you might not notice it for a while, if you've navigated to your desired destination by drilling down folder by folder and then pressing Backspace to get back to the parent folder. Where it breaks down though is with the nice new addressbar acting like a double for a navigatable breadcrumbs (a pretty nice and useful feature in it's own right) and an address input widget, when you've navigated in any other direction than one level down the hierarchy, you start getting into the apparently weird navigation behavior. I can\t count how many times I've pressed Backspace multi

I've been playing around with a crazy idea ...

I've been playing around with a crazy idea of recreating Eclipse JDT tooling with XText. While it does sound a fair bit more than a little crazy, it appeals to me for few reasons: It would give me great opportunity to learn XText and test it in a non-trivial setting. It would give me great opportunity to learn more about Java the language. Having Java source code parsed into a well defined EMF structure opens up JDT to all the  goodness of EMF tooling that has been developed over these past years. It seems like an interesting idea. I wonder if I actually get around to giving it a try...