classical geek

Brought to you by our Evil Pranks Department

If they don’t already know what this particular button does, then it can take them days to get the IDE back to a useable state.

1. Sit next to them.
2. Distract them, by telling them that there’s a dinosaur outside te window, hitting them over the head with a frying pan, or the prank of your choice.
3. Grab the mouse, and press the little button that looks like this, sitting on the main toolbar.

This will switch the editor window between showing the full source of the file being edited (which is expected, and useful), to showing only the currently highlighted method (which is unexpected, and strange). Under this devilishly cunning mode, the arrow keys and Page Up/Down are incapable of breaking out of the currnt element, which, in a constants file, may be no more than a single line of code! Only the outline view can traverse to other methods or members.

The button is small enough, and innocuous enough that your hapless victim may never have noticed it, and the icon is so bland and undescriptive that it doesn’t readily communicate that it has anything to do with editing, or making your fellow coder’s productivity drop through the floor. It gets better, though, as the action of restoring the editor to a sane state of being is hard to describe in words, rendering both google and the well-written Eclipse help files fairly useless.

Mischief accomplished!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 10:12 am and is filed under Tech, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.