You thought you knew everything about cmd.exe!

Last month, Michael Kaplan explained that after all this time, he thought he knew everything there was to know about the MessageBox Win32 API yet managed to find something new to him (and to me as well BTW ;-).

And after all this time, I thought I knew everything one might want to know about the good old command prompt, cmd.exe:

Of course I know that Windows XP's command prompt accepts document names in addition to exe command names. e.g.: you can type services.msc to open the Services applet. Or you can simply type the name of a Word document to open it.
(I say XP's command prompt because IIRC it wasn't the case in previous versions).

I knew about how to enable auto-complete of filenames in Windows 2000 before it became a default setting in XP.

OK, for sure I'm no expert in batch files but at least I know my limits in the area.

A (not so) hidden command history list

But last week, I discovered that I'm not as knowledgeable as I thought. Will you believe the unbearable? Yes, a cmd.exe feature I had never seen before. I was switching between Visual Studio and a couple of command prompts. At some moment, I hit F7 to recompile while the focus was still in one of the command prompts.



Ho! F7 triggers a pop-up window with the command history. Boy, I just can't believe how I have been able to never see that before! The funny thing is that I talked to a couple other developers about it and none of them knew about F7 either.

Auto-complete recent commands

OK, let's try the other function keys to see if there's another handy goodie hiding in there. F8 is the only other interesting one I found: type the start of a command, then F8 repeatedly: it will auto-complete your command with the ones in your command history.

Console window title



While on the subject of less known features, the title command is another interesting one: it sets the title of the console window. This is particularly interesting when you keep several command prompts opened simultaneously : You can immediately identify each one in the task bar instead of having to go through each of these anonymous "c:\windows\sys..." task bar buttons.



And if you are interested in Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts, Jeff Atwood recently posted a summary.

Community-based translations project

A few years ago, who would have bet on the success of Wikipedia ? At the era of computers virii, would you have believed that an encyclopedia whose text can be modified by just anyone on the planet is as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica ? I wouldn't.

Does this principle apply to translations, a typical task that requires outsourcing ? Joel Spolsky recently decided to give it a try and opened the translations of his blog using a wiki.

What about software translation ?

Ryan Smyth is the ALTools Evangelist at ESTsoft (Korea). Ryan does the Korean to English translation but cares about other translations as well. He decided to take advantage of appTranslator Translator Edition's redistributability (Translator Edition is part of appTranslator Professional Edition) to start a users community-based translations projet.

In order to convince his users how fun it can be to translate their favorite software, he even setup a video demo of appTranslator. Cool! I look forward to reading the results.

It's just a little unfortunate that Ryan used Arabic for his demo. I have to admit that support for RTL languages such as Hebrew and Arabic in appTranslator is not as good as it could be. But this only a detail and doesn't affect the demo.

How redistributable is appTranslator TE (Translator Edition) ?

Please note that you are not allowed to publicly redistribute appTranslator TE. As a registered appTranslator Professional Edition user, you are allowed to _privately_ redistribute appTranslator TE, i.e. individually to trusted translators.
Public links to the registered version are of course not allowed. If you want everyone and their cousin to be able to start translating your software, please direct them to the appTranslator demo version, which will do just fine for your project. (I'll think of adding a direct link to the appTranslator TE demo version).

I prefer low-activity blogs to ultra-noisy ones

Yesterday, Ian Landsman mentioned he cleaned up his subscribed feeds list, partly because it contained too many inactive blogs.

What's the problem with being subscribed to too many feeds ? Cluttered blogs list ? No way: Just create a folder with your low-activity blogs and you won't see them again unless you want to.

The real problem is you get drowned into posts and miss the important ones. Kind of yet another corollary of the principle that says that too much information kills information.

Now people who don't post could hardly be convinced of cluttering posts lists, could they ? On the other hand, they might be the kind of people who post when they have something to say! That's why I keep them.

At the other extremity of the spectrum, there are these evangelists who are paid to post. Some of them are interesting people. But still, even the most interesting people don't have 10 interesting things to say every day. In the mean time, _they_ are responsible for the cluttering of blog readers. That's why I've long unsubscribed from people such as Scoble and Sells (Regarding Chris, I hugely prefer to read his books!). The sad thing is that I realize I'm losing interesting news. But I'm just not ready to pay the price.

(That said, even after his cleanup, Ian still still subscribes to more feeds than me ;-)

Why don't journalists use a spell-checker ?

It's incredible. It really p... me off :-(
Online editions of best selling French-speaking Belgian newspapers are constantly FULL of spelling mistakes.

As I'm writing this, there is an obvious mistake in a headlines title on La Libre. The kind of mistakes I stopped doing when I was 8!

I'm sure that the article itself contains at least 4 or 5 such errors.

While I may understand typing mistakes, I can't can't can't figure out why:

a) Journalists don't use spell-checkers. I mean... you really have to work hard to find a word processor without one. Or do they intentionally ignore what their computer shows them?

b) Such errors go unnoticed for so long. Over one hour after I first read this article, the mistake is still there. Hello! Any editor in there ?

As far as I remember, this problem doesn't appear in other non-Belgian papers I'm used to read online. Is this a French-speaking Belgian specific disease ?