Tuesday, January 31, 2023

This Week's Sneak Peek

Saturday's post wasn't quite what I meant it to be.

I always take time to proofread and tweak these history posts, usually hours or days after I'm nearly finished, and often on a different device. There is a strange quirk which may be a feature of Apple computers, or the Foxfire browser, or maybe it's how Blogger interacts with either one: there are routine commands which don't do what I've come to expect them to.

The deadliest is Ctrl-Z.

Proofreading the Saturday post on Friday afternoon, I found a line break and a paragraph break that I didn't want together, so I hit backspace. It got rid of the wrong break, so I hit Ctrl-Z to "undo."

In the Apple-Foxfire-Blogger interface, however, Ctrl-Z is "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"

Everything disappeared. Text, cartoons, line breaks and paragraph breaks alike.

And before I could exit the editor, Blogger autosaved the blank page.

There was nothing to do but recreate the post from scratch. Ctrl-Z in Apple-Foxfire-Blogger doesn't put deleted content into a buffer, so you can't Ctrl-V; the content won't reappear with "redo" (hell, "redo" probably re-exterminates it for all I know).

It reminds me of my first job that involved computer data entry. This was way back before Windows; we were using Atari computers and keyboards, which had an "Abort" key right next to the "Enter" key. "Abort" did exactly what this Apple-Foxfire-Blogger Ctrl-Z does, and no undo, redo, paste or anything else would recover your work.

I don't miss that "Abort" key at all. Ever.

Please take note, whatever Dalek is responsible for Ctrl-Z.

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