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Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

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Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#61

Post by beastcoast »

BeetleB wrote: post #33
hartator wrote: post #13

I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Making a mouse a way to navigate way more efficient than a keyboard? It seems retrograde.

> Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Browsing code is easy to do with a keyboard - not sure I see how a mouse would improve things. Browsing web: Firefox has since forever let you go to and open a link by typing a few characters in the link. I'll grant I don't always do it this way, but it is quite fast - unless the link is an image or something. Finally, if you're one of those people who've had er…

Firefox keyword searches are the way to go - you can setup URLs with arbitrary %s variables and go directly to the results page for a given tool. I have one or two char shortcuts for my most commonly used tools setup and my productivity exploded. With bookmarklets you can embed JavaScript and do things like implement parameters or loop through lists of search terms with each term opening a new tab. Seriously one of the most underrated tools available for anyone that has to use web tools all day.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#62

Post by ehnto »

torben-friis wrote: post #24
hartator wrote: post #13

I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Making a mouse a way to navigate way more efficient than a keyboard? It seems retrograde.

I'm somewhat skeptic regarding pro tools that take a lifetime to master (never got to like emacs for example, and I like MacOS dar more than customizing a Linux distro) but there are some mouseless skills that are such a game changer for me I almost can't use a pc without them, everything else becomes too frustrating. Vimium to browse the web is a Godsend for example. No need to learn for weeks, it's: -j/k for scroll…

You can now add a trigger to focus things instead of click them too, which helps with some hover based menus.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#63

Post by pca006132 »

NoThisIsMe wrote: post #55
hx2a wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also use a Vim Firefox extension to minimize my mouse use browsing the internet. Which one? Vimium-FF? How well does it compare to Vimium in Chromium? I've been wanting to switch from Chromium to Firefox but can't live without Vimium. If it works well, I'll make the switch.

I've only ever used Vimium-FF, so I'm not sure how it compares to the Chromium version, but it worked well enough. Now I use Tridactyl. Check it out. It takes the concept a lot further than Vimium.

I just checked the GitHub page for Tridactyl, it seems to have so many features. Do you have any frequently used feature that only Tridactyl provides but not Vimium-FF?

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#66

Post by surajs »

thanato0s wrote: post #2

"I don't want to try i3 or Vim. What's the point using less of the mouse? Such a waste of time!" That was me, 6 years ago. My colleagues were pushing me to try the tools they were already using for years. They are very good developers, so at the end they convinced me to look at them. I had to admit I was wrong. I fell in love with these tools. From there, I built my system step by step, configured it as I wanted, acc…

hate to be the devil's advocate, but could you throw some numbers about how your productivity or skill set improved as a direct result of not using the mouse?

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#67

Post by mssundaram »

madhadron wrote: post #52
thanato0s wrote: post #2

"I don't want to try i3 or Vim. What's the point using less of the mouse? Such a waste of time!" That was me, 6 years ago. My colleagues were pushing me to try the tools they were already using for years. They are very good developers, so at the end they convinced me to look at them. I had to admit I was wrong. I fell in love with these tools. From there, I built my system step by step, configured it as I wanted, acc…

I was fully mouseless with a tiling window manager (larswm) back in the 1990's. It was very nice, but these days I am very happy with my mouse and graphical tools. Maybe it's senility.

For all my years as a developer I've used a dark terminal and vim theme, until last weekend I just couldn't focus with it anymore. Happy with a light theme for the first time in my life

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#69

Post by haswell »

brudgers wrote: post #10
thanato0s wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I simplify a bit, I see two different approaches: 1. You write something broad as you say. You present many options to the reader. The book is not practical anymore, because you don't speak about something in particular but some general ideas. As a result, the readers can't really practice with a concrete project, and they might end up lost in an ocean of links. If I wanted to do that, I would have created another…

I guess what I am getting at is the vitality of book recommendations not technical merits. There’s nothing wrong with Arch, but I hesitate to recommend it without knowing someone pretty well. The same with Zsh over bash and neovim over Vim. As personal choices backed by experience it’s a different context than a tutorial for others. That’s what I am saying.

If someone is diving down this rabbit hole, they most likely have some level of tech savvy going in. Given that, they likely can decide if the book is for them by doing some very light research on Linux distributions. With a cursory set of results in hand (which will tell me that Ubuntu is easy and Arch is a bit more advanced but not quite as advanced as Gentoo or LFS), I can decide if a very practical book that says it focuses on Arch is a book that is right for me or not.

For me: I'd LOVE this book. I've been around the block, but don't know everything I know I could. Your criticism doesn't seem to have much merit when clearly there is a market for this book and clearly the potential buyer should be trusted to decide whether this book is right or not.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#70

Post by paulryanrogers »

blunte wrote: post #26
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of us mortals, typing is not the bottleneck when we are writing code, an article or whatever. In any case, keyboard-only interfaces make the assumption that you know all of the shortcuts for each program you use. And boy they are inconsistent. They also offer zero discoverability for someone that did not read the manual (see the vim jokes). I like software that offers both good pointer UI + robust keyboard s…

We're all mortals :). Like other endeavors of growth, a good approach is to regularly make a small effort to learn a little more about something (like your tools, which includes keyboard shortcuts). As one simple example, if you have a URL somewhere and you want to quickly open it in a new window, you just use the keyboard shortcuts to copy (which hopefully everyone knows), switch to browser (alt-tab or cmd-tab or ev…

While all true IME the ever growing stack of libraries, frameworks, languages, and infra tools one must learn leaves little breathing room for modest gains in text wrangling.

Most of my time isn't spent slicing and dicing snippets or juggling windows. Rather it's thinking, planning, a bit of experimentation, reading, repeat.

And powerful, built-in auto complete with visual IDEs like IntelliJ or PyCharm make them hard to give up.

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