ArticlesWhat do you call the snippets of text that you put on a clipboard? Rational called them “regionsâ€, and labeled the Home key as “Region†for manipulating them. The key sequence Region ↓ pushed a region onto the clipboard – kind of equivalent to CTRL+C in Windows.
The difference was it was pushed onto a Region “ringâ€, that you could step through (Region ↠and Region →). So much more powerful than a single clipboard, and so much less clumsy than Microsoft Office’s clipboard. You could even delete from the Ring with Region Backspace.)
Regions weren’t the only thing that had their own ring. You could store the current cursor’s position in its own ring (with the same set of commands, except using the Bookmark button rather than the region button.
Rational only supported vertically cascaded windows, but the windows layout was also stored in a ring, so you could jump from a layout suitable for coding, to a layout suitable for debugging in a flash. There was no “Windows Layout†button – they used ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+↓ to store, and ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+↠or ALT+CTRL+→ to move between them.
Actually, that led to an embarrassing moment once: I heard a question over the cubicle: “Julian, what’s the combination to delete a windows layout from the ring?â€
“Hmm.. I have never tried, but logically it would be ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+BACKSPACEâ€
Three seconds later I heard a yelp and my parentage being called into question. It turns out that the IBM Xterm we used considered SHIFT+BACKSPACE to be equivalent to DEL. That made ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+BACKSPACE equivalent to the better known command: CTRL+ALT+DEL! The Xterm rebooted, losing all connections.
I still miss the control that was given by these rings.
- I could work through one piece of code, snaffling up useful snippets, and then rapidly produce similar code, pasting the correct pieces on demand.
- I could hop back and forth between the specification, the code and its output in a flash. Not just the right file, but the right place in the file.
- I could change my entire layout as I changed modes of operation with one keyboard combo.
Where are these operations today?
Comment by Alastair on January 11, 2006
That does sound pretty nice.
emacs has “kill rings” which I’ve never really bothered to learn in depth.
BTW you are now the #1 Google hit on “rational 1000”.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on January 11, 2006
And Vim has named registers. With a bit of scripting this would be easy to duplicate.
Btw, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is the key combo for killing an X server. Sure it wasn’t this which was triggered by the coworker’s swift motion?
Comment by Julian on January 12, 2006
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace? Really? Hmmm… I am concerned my foggy memory may have inserted the mention of the Shift key here to make the story make more sense to me. Perhaps the Windows Layout push command was ALT+CTRL+↓
I really want to know now!
Comment by Julian on January 12, 2006
Good news! While trying to rack my memory about the keyboard shortcut, I recalled that I still had some training manuals, somewhere. They turned out to be buried less than 3 metres from where I was sitting! Unfortunately, they are more focussed on Ada and good software engineering practice, and less on the IDE. Very little about the keyboard shortcuts. 🙁