181–190 of 221 posts
It takes some time getting into, but the rewards were worth it for me. I'm now relying on muscle memory for navigation, and my mouse arm inflammation is gone!
Massive 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.
I know because I had been on some of those unfortunate teams that transitioned to GUI that required to use the mouse and the teller's productivity decreased terribly - something that took 30 seconds ended up taking almost 4 minutes, and seeing this, the banks refused to transition to the "new and advanced" versions, until the old charmode UI was slapped on it again.
On occasion, I need to do something highly repetitive in which case I’ll do something on the command line (with sed, awk, and peers) or I’ll open the file in vim, record a macro and apply it appropriately.
Am I missing something? Am I a weirdo or a dummy in that I’m not itching to type faster and interact more efficiently?
Awesome work! Mouseless is a deep passion of mine though I've never gone all the way like you have here. Will definitely take a look. Have you ever used emacs? I am a relatively new user and longtime vim user and curious to get your thoughts.
Thanks for your interest and your kind words! I tried emacs (I like to try many stuff :D) but it felt a bit too much "program which does everything". I'm a big fan of small programs which can complete each other. You know, the Unix philosophy: "Make each program do one thing well". I'm not a big fan of the keystrokes either, but maybe it's because I'm more used to Vim. Maybe I should try more seriously one day.
I 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.
Fighting your tools interrupts thought. A keyboard is a discrete mechanism: you can make mistakes using hotkeys, but the overall state space is infinitely smaller than the continuous state space of a mouse. That makes precision easier, which leads to a closer mapping between intent and action, which makes it easier to enter and maintain a flow state.
I 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.
The point is these things are wrong sold. The speed of writing code like you have already noted is already is not biggest bottleneck in software development. However what these kind of books/posts fail to sell is as much as software development is about building code to automate things, at some point in time one wonders if software development itself can be automated to a very large extent. The answer is writing code…
Glory to the Holy Shell!
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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 ul…
Do we actually know this, for sure? Obviously, it seems like common sense, but there's a similar argument about piracy, and an opposing position that piracy never managed to kill the industries it was apparently a threat to — if anything (so the argument goes), it might have even boosted them. I've bought physical books in the past, even though they were open source. I might also spend money on a digital open source…
Pretty much, yes.
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Such books tend to become outdated very quickly. See the Arch Wiki installation guide for up to date information.
I'm using Arch Linux for 6 years and I've my own install scripts I describe in the book. I didn't have to change them very often. Even if I love the Arch Wiki, the problem is: it's not tailored for beginners. Now, you could say that Arch Linux is NOT for beginners, but I think everybody should make their own mind. I think people are smart, even if they're beginners. But you're right, sometimes the install change; tha…
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Depends on your keyboard, mouse and overall desk setup. Myself and a coworker use Ergodox keyboards to combat arthritis and carpal tunnel, but if you're using a standard keyboard and terrible posture it might be worse.
That's interesting. My setup is pretty standard, but with the millions I'll do with the book (ahah) I think I'll try an ergonomic keyboard. I put Ergodox in the "stuff I need to check". If you have any other recommendation, please don't hesitate to share :)