Month: October 2016

Keys

First they came for the § key, and I did not speak out –
Because I could never remember what it was for.

Then they came for #, and I did not speak out –
Because you just press opt+3* (and who uses it other than developers?)

Then they came for Delete, and I did not speak out –
Because you could still use Fn + backspace and in any case I had a full size, wired numeric keyboard.

Then they came for F13-F19, and I did not speak out –
Because they were so far away.

Then they came for the full height arrow keys, and I did not speak out –
Because I had mapped up and down to J/K with the Vimium extension.

Then they came for Pg Up/Down, Home & End, and I did not speak out –
Because my full size keyboard still had them and the icons confused me.

Then they came for Escape, and I did not speak out –
Because I could map it to Caps Lock (where it should have been all along) and I wasn’t planning to buy a Macbook anytime soon anyway.

* British layout

Why developers should turn off smart quotes

Ocassionally I write commands in my notes app before copying and pasting them into iTerm.  It’s very easy to type “regular quotes” and not notice macOS has converted them into “smart quotes”.

Then your command doesn’t run, and you get an error message that doesn’t make any sense because the arguments aren’t being parsed correctly, but you don’t notice at first it’s the quotes that are wrong because the font is too small and your mind is fixated on looking for spelling mistakes and syntax problems…

To turn them off, on a Mac go to:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > uncheck “Use smart quotes and dashes”