5 ms·

Excel is a law unto itself. The 'feature' that irritates me the most is how a cell copy is forgotten unless you paste immediately. Bear in mind that this is an

Excel is a law unto itself. The 'feature' that irritates me the most is how a cell copy is forgotten unless you paste immediately. Bear in mind that this is an application so iconoclastic that it had its own C compiler.

philistine 3y ago
This is the thing with Excel. It has such a long history that it had to invent a ton of GUI interactions. A boatload of those interactions were codified in Excel before we created standard ways of doing things that even macOS, Windows and Linux share. In that sense, the modern history of Excel is the slow regression of the app to OS conventions. For the longest time, Excel had its own windowing system within the app. It's only recently that the Office team saw the light and let the whole OS called Windows control window management in Excel.
PhilipRoman 3y ago
One program that does copying right IMO is tmux, it keeps a list of recently copied things, which you can view by pressing Ctrl-B = and choose which clipboard to paste. Very useful when you need to copy multiple separate strings without going back and forth between windows. I've caught myself doing optimistic copying - if I see something that i might need to paste in the future, like git commit hashes, file names, etc. I just copy them all and store them in the clipboard list. I think there is a program "clipmenu" which does this for X11, but haven't used it too much.
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  notepad++ has this feature, and I think current windows versions do as well
- pawelduda 3y ago
  This is my must have extension. Gnome has one and there's an app for that on MacOS. Multiple clipboard entries are such a trivial but useful change that I can't go back to the old way anymore
philiplu 3y ago
Own C compiler? IIRC, that's not quite true. I worked on the C/C++ compiler team at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, and I don't remember us producing a drop of the compiler just for Excel. I do think there was a special compiler flag for them, though, that fixed the order in which global variables were laid out to duplicate the source order. It was either Excel or Word that saved state by taking the addresses of the first and last global variables of interest, then dumping all memory in that range to disk. The flag was something like -bzalign. The bz stood for Bozo, which hints at the compiler team's thoughts on the practice.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tedunangst 3y ago
  They may be referring to a telephone version of the story that excel was originally compiled to p-code for compactness.
  - philiplu 3y ago
    That sounds reasonable. I'd forgotten about the p-code version. I think that was dead by the time I started. I was also fortunate enough to avoid working on the 16-bit compiler backend, and just worked on the 32-bit, referred to internally as the n386 backend, which was pretty much a complete rewrite. The p-code backend would have been a variant of the 16-bit version.
    - tragomaskhalos 3y ago
      The 'own C compiler' is from Joel Spolsky from when he worked at Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-.... And indeed this states that it was p-code. I'm old enough to remember when p-code was - briefly - a very hot idea.
      - philiplu 3y ago

philistine 3y ago

This is the thing with Excel. It has such a long history that it had to invent a ton of GUI interactions. A boatload of those interactions were codified in Excel before we created standard ways of doing things that even macOS, Windows and Linux share. In that sense, the modern history of Excel is the slow regression of the app to OS conventions. For the longest time, Excel had its own windowing system within the app. It's only recently that the Office team saw the light and let the whole OS called Windows control window management in Excel.

PhilipRoman 3y ago

One program that does copying right IMO is tmux, it keeps a list of recently copied things, which you can view by pressing Ctrl-B = and choose which clipboard to paste. Very useful when you need to copy multiple separate strings without going back and forth between windows. I've caught myself doing optimistic copying - if I see something that i might need to paste in the future, like git commit hashes, file names, etc. I just copy them all and store them in the clipboard list. I think there is a program "clipmenu" which does this for X11, but haven't used it too much.

taskforcegemini 3y ago
notepad++ has this feature, and I think current windows versions do as well
pawelduda 3y ago
This is my must have extension. Gnome has one and there's an app for that on MacOS. Multiple clipboard entries are such a trivial but useful change that I can't go back to the old way anymore

philiplu 3y ago

Own C compiler? IIRC, that's not quite true. I worked on the C/C++ compiler team at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, and I don't remember us producing a drop of the compiler just for Excel. I do think there was a special compiler flag for them, though, that fixed the order in which global variables were laid out to duplicate the source order. It was either Excel or Word that saved state by taking the addresses of the first and last global variables of interest, then dumping all memory in that range to disk. The flag was something like -bzalign. The bz stood for Bozo, which hints at the compiler team's thoughts on the practice.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tedunangst 3y ago
They may be referring to a telephone version of the story that excel was originally compiled to p-code for compactness.
- philiplu 3y ago
  That sounds reasonable. I'd forgotten about the p-code version. I think that was dead by the time I started. I was also fortunate enough to avoid working on the 16-bit compiler backend, and just worked on the 32-bit, referred to internally as the n386 backend, which was pretty much a complete rewrite. The p-code backend would have been a variant of the 16-bit version.
  - tragomaskhalos 3y ago
    The 'own C compiler' is from Joel Spolsky from when he worked at Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-.... And indeed this states that it was p-code. I'm old enough to remember when p-code was - briefly - a very hot idea.
    - philiplu 3y ago