Saturday, January 26, 2013

Rant: OSX Find Clipboard - Invokes Baby Punching

OSX has multiple clipboards that allow you to do fairly user friendly actions such as drag and drop various files, fonts, text, etc. Among these clipboards is the global "Find Pasteboard". This has been by far the stupidest and more shortsighted idea i have ever seen implemented by apple.

At first it seems like a great idea, select text somewhere, hit cmd+e and search for it in a completely separate application just by hitting cmd+g. I'm sure certain people find that very useful. But there is a problem with this. A problem that makes me want to punch babies.

For example:
if you search for text in chrome on a webpage, and you switch to sublime text 2 to search for something in your code, it automatically inputs the text that you typed into chrome, into the sublime "find" box. ok...thats odd, i'll just backspace and start typing my search. Ah damn, i forgot the syntax to that one perl regex. When you switch back to chrome to search the page, IT COMPLETELY WIPES OUT/REPLACES YOUR SEARCH IN SUBLIME. so that big long regex i was typing in sublime? gone. Thanks apple, your "feature" wiped out the last 30 minutes of research i was doing.

oh.my.god. this is the type of thing that creates serial killers.

The absolute worst part about all of it, the part where apple's arrogance and unbelievable big head ruins everything, is in the fact that THERE IS NO WAY TO DISABLE IT. AT ALL. ZILCH. NADA. They simply say that "this is intended behavior" which is the equivalent of them giving you the finger and saying "deal with it".

The entire idea of the find clipboard itself is stupid. It's a feature thats hardly known, and much more likely to cause frustration and issues than the problems it solves. The probability that you need to search for two different strings in different applications is obscenely higher than the few situations in which you want to search text from one app in another.

I'm not saying take this feature out, as i'm sure someone might be using it, i'm simply asking for a way to disable it.

This issue is more evidence of what i believe to be apple's worst quality, the arrogance of their imposed "user experience" on the consumer. I'm done with apple, this issue is on top of the dozens of other things that have driven me mad by them. I'm doing back to linux. At least then i have %100 control over my computer.

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