Nice touch, Skype!

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

I work from home, so I rely heavily on Instant Messaging and IRC to communicate with my co-workers, and for video conferencing I use Skype.

I sometimes make typing mistakes. And if the typo is particularly embarrassing, to the extent that I want to fix it to show that I know better,
I usually write something like this:

12:00   I agre.
12:00   s/agre/agree/

Anybody with vi experience or even sed experience will recognize the second line as a search/replace command, so I'm really saying "I said agre but I meant agree". It's reflex at this point - I'll do it for the most minor accident.

I usually only use Skype for video conferencing, not instant messaging. But I just discovered, by accident, that Skype does something wonderful. Instead of showing my substitution command, it applies it to the previous line, instantly, on both sides of the conversation! Look at this:



Ugh, typo, reflexively type s/foo/bar



Voila:



Instead of adding my correction command to the log for the viewer to interpret, it just edited the previous command in place. If I can type this quickly enough, perhaps the reader won't notice!

Chatzilla, Adium, Others - Please please please do this too!

P.S. On the topic of terminal conventions.... I like using ^H's as a "just kidding" device:

12:00   Ok, I'll slap^H^H^H^H tell him about it.

Anyone who's logged into terminals with wrong tty settings will recognize the ^H's as failed backspaces... And I don't want IM clients processing these :)