Ask HN: Does anyone use keyboard/mouse extra buttons for coding?

I use the Red Dragon M990 MMO mouse[1] (with 16 side buttons) for daily computing/productivity. I bought it just for funsies just to see and it was a game changer (pun not intended). Its so good that I have two different mice (the same model) for work & home.

I heavily use the Windows virtual desktop feature along with window snap, so I bound 4 buttons just for that. I also have alt-tab, copy, paste & go bound to dedicated buttons. I have a bunch of buttons also bound for media playback controls (pause/play, vol up/down, next/prev track) since I'm usually listening to something when I use a PC. Then I have some buttons to launch highly useful programs such as Everything Search [2].

I don't play games anymore, but when I did, the mouse supports upto 5 profiles, so using the four programmable buttons near the scroll wheel, I can cycle through various profiles (all color coded too!). So effectively I have 16x5 = 80 dedicated buttons that I can customize based on my computing context. I had profiles dedicated for in-game keys and shortcuts.

But wait! There's more!

I found Stroke Plus [3] which a super-duper amazing program that allows you to create global or app-specific mouse gestures. So fortunately, alot of programs share common key commands such as Find (CTRL+F), Search & Replace (CTRL+H), close tabs, cycles tabs, new window, close window, etc. So I have mouse gestures controlling that. Then I have app specific gestures for windows explorer, so browsing files is super quick.

This is a super amazing setup for me and made me 10x more efficient in navigating things and generally getting things done. When I watch people take two seconds to "hunt and click" various on-screen buttons, tabs, etc....its literally painful to watch how slow and inefficient the process is.

I cant and wont go back. The only downside is that this mouse is wired, so if they ever offered a wireless option (with decent battery life), it would instant buys for me.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Redragon+M990+Legend+mmo+mou... [2]: https://www.voidtools.com/ [3]: https://www.strokesplus.net/

> I'd love to get into stenography but it seems like the amount of memorizing involved is akin to learning a new foreign language, too much to learn as a hobby.

Why learn when you can invent your own shorthand, more natural for you and unless you want somebody else to read the shorthand - not an issue and even then can just translate with a script.

When I started out programming (COBOL) in the early 80's we had a choice of typing coding sheets to send to the typing pool or use one of the terminals and type them ourselves.

So I did my own shorthand and a script (was Honeywell Bull DPS88 running GCOS 8) that would expand the shorthand into the code, of which for COBOL, was lots of typing tokenisations to be done. I expanded it to do most of the Identification etc, pop the date written in and that. Heck I even had it generating a test framework for the code and all this allowed me to churn thru programming faster than the analysts could keep up. Personal best was 26 programs written, tested and signed off by auditors in a day. In a way I kinda wrote what would be known as a framework in a sense in the end as had common aspects like error handling handled automaticlly by the translation. So in the end I wasn't having to type much in for some programs.

Moral being, why learn something complicated when you may very well be able to invent and use a more natural form yourself and evolve it from there.

I don't use a keyboard or a mouse much at all! (because I can't anymore.) instead, I've written and memorized a growing arsenal of voice commands. Saying stuff like "review approve" to approve PRs is handy, though I'm slower over all than I was with working hands.

I use KMonad for achieving QMK things on ordinary keyboards.

https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

A couple of things

- Space Cadet Shifts

- Ctrl and Escape on Caps Lock

- RAlt + hjkl as arrow keys

- SPC + home row as number keys

I recommend anyone to download powertoys, a collection of utilities, and to use the keyboard manager to remap the caps lock key to the backspace key and vice versa. The pinky distance is substantially reduced.

I use the split, column staggered iris keyboard. With another layer I can access any common key or symbol from at most one key away. Nicest thing is how the arrow keys, backspace, space, home, and end are right on the thumb cluster. I actually use the keyboard layout colemak dh but with the s and h in the same place as qwerty, otherwise this small switch gets me. Its way more optimized than qwerty, probably the best on according to what I read.