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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

#201

Post by kamaal »

Grustaf wrote: post #186
kamaal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How often do you have to delete 1000 lines of code? I know I never had to.

It's not about deleting 1000 lines of code, that's just an example.

It could even be as simple as moving cursor 1000 lines below or above. Or doing bulk operations.

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

#202

Post by webgoat »

I've been finding zsh to feel extremely bloated lately and killing my workflow. Mainly because I use oh-my-zsh with several additional plugins, and also because I use guake with at least 10 terminal tabs open at any time. Zsh has some strange refresh issue when SIGWINCH is called to switch back to the guake window that results in more cpu usage when switching back in the longer zsh is open for. Has anyone experienced something similar?

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

#203

Post by webgoat »

tuankiet65 wrote: post #114
torben-friis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I took a look at all of the shortcuts that Vimium offers, and beside the f/F to open the link, other shortcuts are already available natively in Chrome, like: * arrow keys/PgUp/PgDn for scrolling * Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn for switching tabs * Home/End for top/bottom of page * Ctrl-U for source * Ctrl-L for switching to the omnibox * etc I guess some people might wince at the fact that they have to touch the arrow keys or Home…

There's also H for opening a previous history entry or switching to a different tab you have open. This is a big one for me (along with the Auto-Discard extension) since it lets me keep a very large number of tabs open and not have to iterate through every open tab when I want to find something I opened previously again.

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

#204

Post by z5h »

fizixer wrote: post #198
z5h wrote: post #183

Help me understand. I’ve always felt the limiting factor for me was the speed of thought, not typing or other text manipulation. My IDEs (Jetbrains stuff) with their defaults makes it so I spend more time thinking than typing. Often times my best work occurs in the shower, or on a walk and has nothing to do with keyboards or mice. On occasion, I need to do something highly repetitive in which case I’ll do something o…

You don't touch type I assume? Touch typing is not only about typing faster. It gives you this other ability of "running your control panel" out of the home keys only (four fings on each hand resting on a,s,d,f and j,k,l,;). When you have to lift one of the hands off the home keys and move it to the mouse to do anything, and I mean anything, it's super annoying and frustrating. Those who never learned to touch type a…

"Those who never learned to touch type are not likely to grok the appeal of mouseless work."

I think this is the problem. If it can't be explained, it makes me doubt there are objective improvements.

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

#205

Post by ducktective »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #34
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.

A mouse is an interface best suited for continuous-shaped requirement, e.g. aiming a pointer in games, drawing, and other inherently 2-dimensional arbitrary precision input modalities. Textual interfaces (e.g. code), reading, navigating filesystems, etc. is inherently discrete (folders have files, files have words, words have letters). For discrete applications such as these, I (and many others) prefer mouseless mode…

Possibly the best explanation on keyboard-oriented workflow. Bravo!

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

#207

Post by loa_in_ »

SilasX wrote: post #195
loa_in_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Firefox, by default, you can search for text of an element using forward slash. Then you hit escape and hit enter to activate it, or tab to navigate past it. That alone made 90% of websites practically mouseless for me

I just tried that, and while it does select the element, it still doesn't allow me to click on them as you suggested or any other way I could find[1]. (That is, it works in general, but only on links where my extension would be able to pick up the clickability already.) [1] Example: clicking on a currency here [2] or a time window here [3]. [2] https://www.coinbase.com/ [3] https://www.coinbase.com/price/bitcoin

It seems the site is actively preventing it somehow. It might enable clicks only after onmouseenter or onmouseover events. You might want to try simulating them. It also might register onkeydown events that catch pressing enter key on them. You might want to disable those.

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

#208

Post by loa_in_ »

SilasX wrote: post #195
loa_in_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Firefox, by default, you can search for text of an element using forward slash. Then you hit escape and hit enter to activate it, or tab to navigate past it. That alone made 90% of websites practically mouseless for me

I just tried that, and while it does select the element, it still doesn't allow me to click on them as you suggested or any other way I could find[1]. (That is, it works in general, but only on links where my extension would be able to pick up the clickability already.) [1] Example: clicking on a currency here [2] or a time window here [3]. [2] https://www.coinbase.com/ [3] https://www.coinbase.com/price/bitcoin

Additionally some sites register click events on parents higher up in the DOM tree and then determine the child/spot under the cursor. That forces you to supply some coordinates yourself.

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

#209

Post by ehnto »

lornajane wrote: post #133
ehnto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm a vimium user and I wasn't aware of this, how useful! I checked the docs and I can't find it, do you know what it's called or how to do it please?

If you go to Vimium options and enter this line into the custom key mappings it should work:

    map c LinkHints.activateMode action=hover
You can change c to whatever key you want to trigger it. It works perhaps less often than I was hoping for, a lot of menus still won't work, presumably because they use JS or something else to trigger the menu.

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

#210

Post by Grustaf »

kamaal wrote: post #201
Grustaf wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you have to delete 1000 lines of code? I know I never had to.

It's not about deleting 1000 lines of code, that's just an example. It could even be as simple as moving cursor 1000 lines below or above. Or doing bulk operations.

This probably depends on what you’re working with, but I never really need to do bulk operations. And moving the cursor a 1000 lines I can do in a second through the magic of two finger swiping and inertial scrolling. Though most of the time i need to go to a particular function, not row, so I’ll just do a quick search.
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