Do little things well
If you want to do something BIG, its important you start by doing something little, and do it well.
- Marco Pierre White: "Perfection is lots of little things done well."
- Colin Powell: "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude."
- Vincent Van Gogh: "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."
It's also beautifully captured in Gall's Law:
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."
Worth keeping in mind in this new reality of AI and rampant complexity.
So why am I telling you this?
Because I reinstalled my laptop, and ran into a micro-annoyance I'd forgotten existed.
Home? End? Do you use them? They're really helpful keys, part of my muscle memory. They jump you to the start (Home) or end (End) of the current line.
This is standard behaviour on every major operating system... except macOS. Where they jump to the top or bottom of the entire document.
On Mac, you *can* use Cmd+Left/Right to do the same thing. But why use a two-key combo when there's a perfectly good single key that should already do the job?
So when I hit this micro-annoyance, instead of just fixing it for me, I got AI to fix it in a way I can share. Fixing it for everyone.
Here's a script that makes macOS do what every other OS has done since... forever: fix-home-end-keys.sh
It remaps Home and End to behave like I (and probably you) expect:
- Home moves to the start of the line
- End moves to the end of the line
- Shift+Home selects to the start of the line
- Shift+End selects to the end of the line
It works in native macOS apps (Cocoa). Electron apps like VS Code and Slack handle their own keybindings, so they're unaffected. Safe to run multiple times. Just needs a logout to take effect.
It's a little thing. But these little things add up.
