Irritating defaults in Linux Applications

If there is one thing that Linux/Unix applications are famous for, other than being open source - it is the irritating defaults they set. And just when you figured out how to disable the most irritating ones, you upgrade to a newer version, and they flood you with even more irritating defaults.

Vim takes the prize in this behavior. Every time I upgrade my Fedora, I get a new version of vim, and while I stopped finding any actual improvements between the vim I used 7 years ago and now, the new set of irritating defaults gets me. After upgrading to Fedora 9, with Vim 7.1, this struck me again.

While writing a piece of C code, the program keeps highlighting matching braces, whenever my cursor passes over them. This is mightly irritating, and I could not think of one good reason for making this the default behavior. I am a hardcore programmer and I know where the F*** match for that brace is!!! And the worst part was figuring out what the offending setting was. I tried googling for it, but it was difficult, since the normal terms like "brace", "bracket", "highlight", "show brace", "show match" did not turn up any results about the offending behavior.

Then it struck me that I was searching with the wrong terms, and put in "vim irritating brace" into google and presto! there were tons of forums where people like me were bitching about that behavior. The answer to turn off the feature is to add this to your .vimrc file

let loaded_matchparen=1

Long way to go... before ppl stop messing around with defaults.. Linux is no longer just a programmer's system, but an end-user system. Not every one would like to spend hours trying to figure out why something has changed since their last upgrade... the sooner the linux developers realize this, the better.