Alieniloquent

There’s a plugin for the Delphi IDE called GExperts. This plugin provides a metric ton of addons. The one that we use it for here at my office is Grep. In most ways it is superior to Delphi’s find-in-files functionality. There are two key-chords associated with grep: Alt-Shift-S to bring up the search screen and Alt-Ctrl-R to bring up the search results.

That’s great. The problem is, I do one way more than the other. So I remember the correct bucky bits for grepping, but I frequently forget the correct ones for bringing up the search results.

Naturally, I will try Alt-Shift-R before Alt-Ctrl-R, figuring the bucky bits would be the same. And for two years, nothing has ever happened. Then one day last week, I’m sitting on an assignment statement like this:

Foo := Bar;

I hit Alt-Shift-R and all of the sudden I’ve got this:

Bar := Foo;

“Whisky tango foxtrot,” I say, and hit again. It flips again. I try it on this:

Result := Foo(Bar);

And I get:

Foo(Bar) := Result;

Thanks, GExperts.

Now, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why anybody would want this feature. Until I read the documentation. It will also flip the direction of a for loop. That is actually neat and cool.