Four Island

Recently, I was toying around in CompizConfig Settings Manager because I wanted to see what effects were available. I did find something interesting: I could make anything full-screen by pressing -F10, but that's not what this post is about. One of the other effects I saw was entitled "Zoom Desktop" and I tried it out just to see what it did (which should have been evident from the title).

So, I initiated the effect by right-clicking while holding down super. Nothing appeared to happen, so I decided to disable the effect. Nothing happened. I frantically clicked on the disable button and nothing at all happened. "Oh god, I've ruined my computer," and "Haha! Cats meow," were some of my prevalent thoughts at that point.

Some of you may be screaming at me at this point, but I was seriously stumped. I spent a half an hour trying to disable the effect because, while a key binding for initiating the effect was present in the configuration manager, no key binding for disabling the effect was. Eventually, in sheer desperation, I hit the Escape key. As if by magic, the screen popped back to normal and I was left feeling like an idiot.

There are two problems that I see in this (other than the fact that I have no common sense). First, from a Xidet point of view, what if the user wants to bind "disable zoom" to another key? Oh my god, what if someone wants to use a keyboard combination instead of a mouse combination?! :P No, that's not my main argument, I just wanted an excuse to say "Xidet." :P

The real problem is with idiots like me. What if some user goes into CCSM like I did and enabled an interesting looking effect to see what it did and didn't think of pressing Escape to disable the effect? It says nowhere on the form that Escape will stop the effects of the effect (lol). I was ready to shut my computer down to get out of the effect. Think of how much data could've been lost! :P

Anyway, the point of this odd rant (and I do seem to be making a lot of those recently :P) is that the lack of documentation had a possibly destructive effect on my data. Instructions have to be easily visible for idiots like me.