Toub and Hanselmann at the Build Conference 2024

This 46-minute presentation by Scott Hanselman and Stephen Toub is ten months old but is still worth watching. I note below that one of the more significant things Toub shows is not any sort of programming wizardry, but column-selection in a text editor. Half of the things that people use AI for can be solved with column-select and judicious copy/paste.

'Highly Technical Talk' with Hanselman and Toub | BRK194 by Microsoft Developer (YouTube)

Another fantastic “deep dive” with these two: this time they’re optimizing the Humanizer library on-the-fly, on-stage, during a session. This feels nearly completely improvised. Kudos to these two gen-Xers, doing an old-school presentation of just plain programming bravura with no frills.

At 38:20, Toub shows how to use column-select to make changes, which wows the audience. I guess it’s really not such a well-known feature, but it’s an incredible productivity booster. Toub uses the mouse to select when he could have just used the keyboard to select the lines with Alt + Shift + down or by selecting the space and starting double-quote, then Alt + Shift + . to select subsequent matches. After that, he used the mouse again to select the end of the lines, but he could have just left the lines selected from before and hit End to jump to the end of all the lines. It’s good that he showed it but, as in previous videos, he’s a bit more of a “mouser” than I am.