It’s not springtime just yet, but I found myself nerd sniped this week by an easter egg in my favorite LaTeX editor, TeXStudio.
I had to reinstall it recently, and my customized advanced configurations were set back to the defaults. So I opened the Options -> Configure TeXStudio menu, and tried to click on the “Show advanced options” checkbox. This is what popped up:
That’s right, a “Riddle” window popped up with the following problem:
You come to a magic island where you meet three strange and wise friends.
One of them is always telling the truth, another one is always lying, and the third is deaf, so he answers randomly and cannot lie(!).
You ask the first: “Are you lying?” and he answers: “No”.
You ask the second: “Is the first one lying?” and he answers: “No”.
You ask the third: “Is the second one lying?” and he answers: “No”.Which one of the three wise [friends] will always tell the truth?
I thought it was a great idea — giving the user a riddle to solve as a way of saying, “Think carefully before you mess around with the advanced options!” If you type in the correct answer (1, 2, or 3) then it will let you edit the advanced options, and otherwise it will send you back to the basic options screen.
Of course I had to solve the problem rather than just guessing 1, 2, or 3 until it let me through. And I won’t spoil it with an answer here… have fun!
I was sitting with my bachelor project, hitting a wrong button, when I wanted to compile my project (normally it just hit F1).
It resulted in a yellow rubber duck popping up on my screen instead of my project being compiled.
I cannot replicate it, and after some search on Google, I did not find anyone writing about it.
Please let me know, if you have encountered the same little easter egg..
By the way, I could not bring the get the riddle popup, when I entered the advanced options menu 🙁
But I can tell you that you do not need to know, what they answered, you only need to know that they all answered the same.. 🙂
I also saw the yellow duck as I wanted to compile my project, but I also was not able to replicate it.
Frank
pressing escape for a few times very fast popped the rubber duckie. and it happened again after some time, so you can replicate it.
Interesting, I have not encountered the yellow duck. I’ll let you know if I run into it!
Maria
I am currently working on my thesis. Every time I change something, I hit the F1 button to compile the text. And whole of a sudden the rubber duck shows up because I pressed esc instead of the F1 button. At first I was like “omg, now i broke it”….
The rubber duck in TeXstudio showed up again: https://www.dropbox.com/s/orlmr6ib586fv11/rubberDuck.png
It is still there:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1024660980907466&set=a.255977627775809.63544.100000907211770
Happened to me too! I can’t seem to replicate it (even though I could do it 5 times or so before it stopped working), but I know I had just searched for “ne” and had the part “ne” in the word “refinement” marked, after which I pressed ESC a few times, making the duck show up.
If you press ESC several times it appears a windows with a yellow duck !
I can confirm it does! But it seems to work quite sporadically. Pressing escape a repeated number of times does eventually summon the yellow rubber duck, though.
BTW, this looks like the same duck as is on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rubber_Duck.jpg
got it too. The duck on wikipedia looks very similar, but TeXstudio uses a more compressed version I’d say 😉