The tyranny of standards

As noted earlier, I just upgraded to ecto 2.0, and discovered, among other problems, a really annoying “bug”: my normal clipboard shortcut keys don’t work.

So I’ve been using Windows since 3.x, and Word for DOS before that (and, if I can digress a second, I was astonished when I visited Pasadena last week and was recognized by a secretary who I had in a Word for DOS I taught back — well, on the order of 15 years ago, at least), and the standards I learned for the clipboard were:

Shift-Del = Cut
Ctrl-Ins = Copy
Shift-Ins = Paste

Yes, I was aware that there were letter-combos for that same thing, Macintosh-like stuff on the order of

Ctrl-D = Cut
Ctrl-C = Copy
Ctrl-V = Paste

But, what the heck, I can be open-minded about such things. Never mind that I come from an era when Ctrl-C was a cancellation/interrupt command — if folks want to use it for copying to the clipboard, it’s a big tent.

Imagine my shock when, upon firing up ecto 2.0, I discovered that my shortcuts didn’t work any more, just those Ctrl-DCV things. Blasphemy! A Mac-ish Plot (not far-fetched when you realize ecto was originally a Mac product)! And, more importantly, a major change, akin to switching the side of the steering wheel the turn indicator is on (which, believe me, I’ve experienced, too).

I wrote a note to the developer in the forum, and was told that, well, no, that wasn’t how the new rich text editor worked, and that those older shortcuts were no longer standard. Which sent me digging around a bit, and I discovered, to my dismay (if not shock) that, in fact, he was right. Sort of. The Ins/Del pairings have been de jure deprecated in Windows. From MSDN’s ‘s Windows User Interface and Design Development, in the Appendix on Keyboard shortcuts, the Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-D items are footnoted:

The system supports shortcut assignments available in earlier versions of Microsoft Windows (ALT+BACKSPACE, SHIFT+INSERT, CTRL+INSERT, SHIFT+DELETE). You should consider supporting them (though not documenting them) to support the transition of users.

And I found that through another reference that the deprecation dated back to Win95 and WinNT. Yikes.

But it’s worth noting that despite the old deprecation, I’m not aware of a single current M$ application that doesn’t still “support the transition” with them. It may not be the de jure standard, but it is the de facto standard.

It is doubtless a waste of keyboard combos to support two different ways of manipulating the clipboard, but it seems to me the last thing you want to do is break something that people do automatically unless there’s a significant reason to do so. And adherence to a standard is not a significant reason; it’s a method. The reason would have to be some other use for those keys, or some technical problem. Otherwise, it would be just as simple to change the standard to Alt-A, Alt-B, Alt-C, and Alt-D. I mean, just because there would be confusion for no purpose doesn’t mean it’s wrong, so long as it adheres to the current standard, correct?

For what it’s worth, the ecto developer has put adding in the other shortcuts onto his to-do list, which is nice of him. But that may happen sometime in the distant future and, to be perfectly honest, it’s a real turn-off from retaining the upgrade (especially with some of its other problems) until it gets fixed.

Your software development lesson for today: Don’t mess with how people do things with your product, unless you can offer them real value for doing so.