Microsoft developers have gone mad. Again.

Try to open two files with the same name from the different directories in Excel. You cannot, as it will give you an error message to that effect. Nice!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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TexMaker is dead

Open-source community shows its true face once again. Previously a fabulous product - TexMaker - became essentially useless due to huge number of small, but annoying bugs creeping in. When contacted with the bug reports, its author Pascal Broshet reacted in a surprising (for a stranger to Open Sorce) but typical for me manner: he deleted the incidents from his bug tracker, replied in an annoyed and rude tone and then spread lies on tex.stackexchange.com QA site.

Pascal is really sounding deranged in his posts, that he makes under 'user27168' alias on tex.SE. He accused TexStudio users of "creating false bug reports" as if there was a global conspiracy against him. But how would he know that a bug report was false, if he did not even triage it, never even got our feedback and simply deleted the incidents?

To substantiate my claim of bugs I will mention the following:

1. Various glitches in search, such as not searching upon the first press of Enter, but on the 2nd only; search box recalling a wrong search term from the drop down list.
2. Weird behaviour in undo/redo, when sometimes undo works action at a time, other times character at a time in very similar context.
3. Painful glitches with inserting environments: \begin{} \end{} auto-completion positions caret somewhere in the middle of the inserted lines and selecting \end{} in order to move it to the bottom of the text block it is supposed to close takes quite a few keystrokes. And another horrible bug related to the same function: using auto-complete of environment replaces the the word immediately following the caret.
4. Bookmarks are not staying on the line where they are set if previous line breaks are inserted or deleted. Bookmarks moving around is a royal pain when editing documents.
5. UI freezing and non-working Stop button make it impossible to abort compilation.
6. Switching between insert and overtype mode, all by itself... Realizing that you just overwrote a good chunk of text is priceless... And then it is priceless undoing it one letter at a time (see above).
7. By some twisted logic, pressing Ctrl-T (to comment out a line) inserts % sign at the caret, not at the beginning of the line. As if Pascal believes, that instead of pressing Shift-5 for % we prefer Ctrl-T.

Could these have passed QA if there was one? It is sounding like Pascal is not even bothering with unit-testing!

There are more, but I simply do not have time or will to keep them in mind as I have to work on the documents and produce the drafts in limited time. Pascal is not making it any easier and this is a last straw that finally makes me abandon Linux TexMaker that I previously loved for Windows TexStudio.

Why Windows, you might ask? Ha-ha! Because Linux TexStudio requires me to install a full-blown instance of texlive from the repository, even though it is already installed from a DVD. Of course there is no such requirement on Windows. Linux... a royal PITA these days.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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