191–200 of 228 posts
Honestly, I never really had that much love for Emacs until relatively recently. I've always dabbled due to it generally having good support for most languages (including esoteric ones) but recently I got into it a lot more due to the fact that many of the new-ish OSS editors but Emacs has always been there and likely will always be there. A few years back I got into Atom quite a bit since it checked all the boxes: e…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I found I am unique, I never learned to touch type but at the same time reaching for a mouse really slows me down. I realized years into using Vim that the reason I love it so much is that I can do all my editing from the keyboard and because it is a deterministic state machine (modal) I can have a mental copy of the editor running in my head while I'm not looking at the screen. This is important to me because I look…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I found I am unique, I never learned to touch type but at the same time reaching for a mouse really slows me down. I realized years into using Vim that the reason I love it so much is that I can do all my editing from the keyboard and because it is a deterministic state machine (modal) I can have a mental copy of the editor running in my head while I'm not looking at the screen. This is important to me because I look…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?
However, I still type easily without looking at the keyboard, and I'm about as fast as the average typist, perhaps faster.
Could I speed up more? Possibly, but I don't feel that I'm slowed down by typing speed, and I find my way to type better when one uses a lot of special characters, as is common when doing programming and accessing Emacs keys.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly improves life at a keyboard.
To be honest, in programming, the speed of writing on keyboard itself isn't the most limiting factor during development. I've forced myself to learn to touch type (not fully, I don't press spacebar with a thumb of opposing hand as last letter written, I also almost exclusively use left shift), but that doesn't make me a fastest programmer around. Development looks more like "I type two words, I look at the screen for…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I found I am unique, I never learned to touch type but at the same time reaching for a mouse really slows me down. I realized years into using Vim that the reason I love it so much is that I can do all my editing from the keyboard and because it is a deterministic state machine (modal) I can have a mental copy of the editor running in my head while I'm not looking at the screen. This is important to me because I look…
I've told IntelliJ and Eclipse and VSCode to please stop popping up suggestions, and let me type Ctrl+space to summon them.
Aaaah. Much better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people get by with pseudo-touch typing. They have most of the speed down, and look down at the keyboard occasionally, but they do not have the accuracy that is displayed in true touch-typing.
That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly improves life at a keyboard.
I always gave up after about a week, I've tried it twice or three times during the last 25 years. Like always, good (fast) enough beats perfection. And I'm a mathematician and programmer because I'm lazy :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, in programming, the speed of writing on keyboard itself isn't the most limiting factor during development. I've forced myself to learn to touch type (not fully, I don't press spacebar with a thumb of opposing hand as last letter written, I also almost exclusively use left shift), but that doesn't make me a fastest programmer around. Development looks more like "I type two words, I look at the screen for…
On the other hand, code is often not the only output. Tickets, design docs, bug repros, emails, wikis, user docs, etc. Touch typing can remove one source of friction there.