4 ms·
[Generic advice] As a rule of thumb I don't customize critical software because: 1. Upgrades often break customizations. And modern software upgrades all the
by brudgers 3y ago
[Generic advice]
As a rule of thumb I don't customize critical software because:
1. Upgrades often break customizations. And modern software upgrades all the time.
2. What I think I want, is rarely what I actually wind up using.
3. I know I won't write comprehensive documentation to guide other users...including my future self. In three years/months/weeks/days/hours I will be wondering what the hell I did. Particularly because of 2.
What I believe, is the skill of adapting myself to playing the software as it lies is more frequently more valuable than the skill of trying to predict how I will use it and the skills of figuring out how to customize it and debugging my customizations.
For me, customizations tend not to be sticky. There are exceptions. I still find the same set of Autocad aliases useful 30 years later...but those are command line (e.g. 'c' for 'copy' & 'cc' for 'circle' instead of 'c' for 'circle' and 'cp' for 'copy' because I use copy much more than circle and because /c is a left hand character and /p is a right hand character and my right hand is on the trackball. Also someone pointed out the left hand right hand thing to me, I'm probably not smart enough to figure that out myself...but I digress. I still have to customize Autocad everytime I use it on a different machine (and over 30 years I have to take off my socks to enumerate them all).
The tldr is that the average case is that customizations come with a promise of more work in the future and that there is little control of when that more work will need to be done.
I should add that other people's customizations are usually worse than the standard behavior because of documentations.
And the default behaviors are the simplest thing that might work.
But YMMV.
Good luck.