Stop helping me!

How is it that these days the best power user tools are the ones where you can turn all the “helpful” features off?

What am I talking about? Go ahead. Open a Microsoft Word document. Place your cursor anywhere in the text. Try to select one character using only the keyboard.

You can’t. Word “helpfully” expands your selection to the entire word. Sure, you can turn this behaviour off: on a Mac, go to Word > Preferences > Edit and uncheck “When selecting, automatically select entire word”.1

Sometimes the behaviour is more annoying, like Excel’s complete failure to handle dates, or some of the more obnoxious iOS autocorrect failures, such as insisting that when I typed “its” I must really have meant “it’s”.

The uncanny valley between n00bs and gurus is where the wizards live

The reason these functions are there is to assist the “average” user: someone who is more than a Muggle, but less than a power user. These are the sorts of people who don’t know about shift-alt-arrow to select an entire word, and instead laboriously tap-tap-tap that arrow key until they have selected the word. They complain that “Word is hard to use”, and eventually Word gets the default behaviour of selecting the entire word.

This of course drives actual power users up the wall, because if we had wanted to select an entire word, we would have used the command that actually does that. And if I wanted to futz around with regular expressions, I wouldn’t have opened Excel in the first place. And so on and so forth.

This is why I use my highly advanced graphical user interface to run… a command line. In fact, a Terminal window is one of the most frequent apps you’d find open in my session, right behind Safari and ahead of my mail clients.

Image by Nicola Perantoni via Unsplash

  1. On Windows, the instructions change as follows: take your computer, throw it out the nearest window, then go and buy a Mac. ↩