Category: windows

unhandy windows key shortcuts with eclipse

May 3rd, 2008 · Peter Paul Bakker · Software, windows No comments - Tags: , , , ,

Finding the advanced keyboard settingsSome developers around me were complaining that every once in a while the keyboard settings would change while programming eclipse. I was not aware, but it turned out I changed my settings years ago to prevent this from happening. Here is the cause:

The default company settings of Windows XP are to have the keyboard layout key shortcuts enabled by default.

These are located in ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Regional and Language Options’ > ‘Languages’ > ‘Details’ > ‘Key Settings’ > ‘Change Key Sequence’

‘CTRL + shift’ or ‘left Alt + shift’ switches between keyboard layouts. For instance between US and Dutch/NL layout. For the Dutch layout, for instance, you need to type quotes (“) followed by a space to display them in the editor. Very unhandy for programmers.

This combination is also used in Eclipse: for instance “shift + ctrl + T” to popup the Type selector.

Disable the microsoft windows key binding by unchecking the designated checkboxes!

Simple Screenshot tool for Windows

March 29th, 2008 · Peter Paul Bakker · Software, windows No comments - Tags: , ,

Here is a handy little tool that I use to make screenshots on windows: ScreenHunter.
It can make screenshots of a selected window, but also of any part of the screen. Including mousepointer and drop down menus if needed! And the most simple edition is free, but effective.

Using IE Developer Toolbar with popups

March 5th, 2008 · Peter Paul Bakker · ruby, watir, windows No comments

The Ruby Watir library makes it possible to automatically click through web apps. This is useful for automated integration or functional testing.

The IE Developer Toolbar makes it easy to view the DOM structure of the pages to automatically test and find all the ids and names of the links and buttons to click.

To activate the developer toolbar you click on the IE Developer Toolbar button on top of the browser menu bar. With popup screens without a menu bar, this is not possible.

Te solution I use here is to click ‘F11′ in the IE popup window, which expands it to full screen. Now the IE Developer Toolbar is clickable! Now you can find the ids of the HTML widgets in the popup.

Kill multiple processes at once

March 5th, 2008 · Peter Paul Bakker · tools, windows No comments

This is a little trick that comes in handy when there are a lot of processes that you want to kill in one go on windows.

When I was automating excel spreadsheet/reports generation, every time I did a test run, another excel instance would open.

To get rid of a whole bunch of them, from the command line:

c:> pskill excel

The same thing for Internet Explorer:

c:> pskill iexplore

This is part of the pstools of (formerly) sysinternals.