Love the look of this! I'll pick this up once I have a paycheck again. Some of the tools are already in my tool-belt but looks like there is plenty to chew on.
Thanks for your kind words! I hope you'll like it!
Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#142Sounds great, and thanks for the generous sample!
I think a lot about mouseless computer interaction myself as I am making KeyCombiner[1], which is an application to organize, learn, and practice keyboard shortcuts.
Among many other things, it can map collections of keyboard shortcuts onto a virtual keyboard. This helps immensely when looking for free combinations or conflicts, which is often the case with VSCode and Neovim. You can have a look at the public VSCode collection[2] to see the visualizer in action.
KeyCombiner's concept of building your own shortcut collections could be very handy for your proposal to create your own cheat sheets. With KeyCombiner Desktop[3], you can instantly look up these cheat sheets. In addition to your own collections (cheat sheets), the instant lookup always shows the default keyboard shortcuts of the active application.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#143Glory to the Holy Shell!
I knew this book will be the beginning of a cult.
Welcome, brother (or sister). We'll sing while burning some mice and love each others using a limited amount of keystrokes.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#144Quick practical tip: "turtle your mouse". We all know we should probably learn more keyboard shortcuts to be more efficient, but it's hard to have the discipline to practice them when we're busy and the mouse is so easily accessible. My hack for this is to "turtle" my mouse: flip it upside down so it looks like a turtle on its back.
This introduces a tiny bit more effort to using the mouse - you have to flip it over first. I find adding that little bit of resistance makes me much more likely to learn keyboard shortcuts, which in turn make me more efficient overall.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#145i dont like typing. it is a waste of time and very slow and error prone method at least in my case. i have too big fingers and i make too much spelling errors(not related to fingers). i developed my own style copy/paste/search/replace method. simply i just copy paste tons of code(you cant type so fast) and replace names. removing redundand code is faster then typing new one :) you are not bored typing for the miliont…
also, i use i3, tmux, emacs and vscode on daily basis. i changed my unix experience(mostly cli) into something close to a roguelike game - shell scripting + fzf + make + direnv can make cool things together. the less typing the better, and faster.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those of us who can type very quickly, every movement of the hand away from the keyboard (to the mouse) and back has a high cost in terms of lost typing opportunity. If speed and subconscious operation are the goal, then it's best to stick to as much keyboard only as possible, or alternately to learn to maximize the one hand keyboard + mouse approach (which can actually be very fast once you know your tools).
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…
As a mere mortal with limited Working Memory, the bottleneck is getting sketch-thoughts out of my head where I can see them and edit them.
Others' needs are different.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#147"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…
your explanation as to why the book isn't 'free or open source' is an explanation that you need money to continue the endeavor while living life successfully. This makes one feel like a broken record, but this compels me to mention that there are major differences between 'gratis' and 'libre'.[0] Open-source/free and for-profit are not at odds with each other. They describe different ideas. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.…
This gets explained a lot; what doesn't get explained as much is how folks can continue to make money for their work in the "libre" world. It's certainly possible - dual licensing, services, premium editions, physical books, etc., and it's not a bad thing. But my guess is that a "libre" version of this guy's book would rapidly turn into a "gratis" version of it too - a "good enough" PDF would get passed around and ultimately be the main way most people would see his stuff.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#148Massive popularity of Indian accounting software tally is because of mouse-less handling of the whole interface. Mouse uses three organs while keyboard uses only one.
Mouse requires coordination between hand and eye to do action, but what is the third organ, that a keyboard does not require?
My guess would be the arm, which has to move when moving the mouse pointer.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#149Every time i have to use mouse heavy interface I just lose the motivation. It feels like in GUIs you just spend most time searching things, while with cli and plain text files you can easily search existing examples and documentation for reference while typing whatever you want to accomplish. Recently I had to work with Unity and it reminded me how I loathe monolith integrated workflows.
Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment
#150I don't know about you, but when I'm programming I probably spend 95% of the time thinking, so making navigation faster won't affect my overall efficiency much.
Come to think of it, I'm also thinking while typing and navigating so I'm not sure this would save any time at all.
It might _feel_ faster though, which might increase the well-being of some developers.