New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#661

Post by kps » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #8

Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket . Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches. (More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side o…

  > ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket

Technically — and here I go of on the stereotypical irrelevant nerd tangent (bind the adjectives as you will) — it's the other way around. ASCII was certainly designed with Shift and Control modifiers in mind, and arranged so that a device could have those keys merely flip a bit (see e.g. " rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard>), but nothing actually mandates that those keys exist and that Control+h generate Backspace or Shift+h generate H.

I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#662

Post by Spartan-S63 » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #621

kenoph wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried "jk" but I hated seeing the cursor pause every time I used "j" to go down.

That doesn't seem right- I use "jj" to escape insert mode and nothing unusual happens when I use hjkl to navigate in normal mode. The only "pause" is when I type the letter "j" in insert mode.

Yeah, I agree. That doesn't seem right at all. I use "inoremap jk " to remap my escape key.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#663

Post by st3v3r » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

major505 wrote: post #545

rhapsodic wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esc is, by and large a useless key I'm not a Mac User, but I use THE ESC key extensively to cancel out of dialogs.

Also... the F1 keys are like super important for debugging. Sure, you can click with the damn mouse in the button for step in, over, run, etc, but the thing is faster with F keys. Even if mac apps come mapped to other keys, many peaplo still runs windows with bootcamp, virtual box etc and wine programs in apple computers, making things even harder. And about external keyboards? Apple keyboards comes with F keys... th…

The F1 keys are not important for debugging. When I'm debugging, I'm not concerned with what's faster. So I use the icons and the mouse.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#664

Post by marky421 » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

Why no mention of the lack of MagSafe? I can't count the number of times that brilliant little connector saved my laptop from certain death. So sad to see it's gone.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#665

Post by mikeash » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #657

mikeash wrote: post #337

I'm always amazed at how techies are so often unable to consider other people's points of view. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but no. If you don't like the new design, that's totally fine. I've seen a lot of people saying that. But when you say that the new design is bad for everybody , or bad for millions of people you haven't met, based solely on your own personal reasons, you've lost it. I'm a developer. T…

Techies don't say it's useless for everybody, though. They say it's useless for techies. And that should be a statement they are allowed to make.

I disagree. "Techies" is a huge group and it's ridiculous to think you can speak for all of them, especially when your argument comes down to function keys. As I said, I'm a member of that group and I don't use them. This person is saying that the new MacBook Pro is not for me. What makes it OK for them to speak for me?

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#666

Post by erikb » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #654

People like to use rhetoric to pretend that their opinion is universal as a preventative measure for suppressing disagreement. Programmers, unfortunately, like to apply this to things that are transparently subjective, targeted at an intelligent audience that often takes umbrage to being told what to think. I feel like I should flag this article for being nothing more than rhetorical rabble-rousing[0], but frankly so…

The best way for smart people to kill a community is to go somewhere else. Because when the smart people are gone, there is nothing interesting left in the community to follow. Therefore that's an option I want to suggest to you. Let us stupid people destroy ourselves here. Thanks.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#667

Post by radus » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

If you don't mind an additional dongle, maybe the following can help: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#668

Post by st3v3r » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #480

zzzcpan wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESC key is the default in vim, most vim users do use it.

Thanks for some sanity. The other anecdote is I've been using vim for about 15 years, and use esc daily. I am constantly in multiple vim environments - different servers, different clients, different OS, etc. I don't have the luxury of saying "I'm going to install all my default vim keybindings and plugins on every vim installation I ever use". Walking someone else over the phone who has to do vim - I need to count o…

I'd have to say that your use case is in the minority too.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#669

Post by barleymash » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

tmaly wrote: post #614

lucisferre wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I nearly exclusively use VIm and any other editor I use has a VIm mode plugin installed. I pretty much can't work productively in anything else. I can tell you that I haven't used Esc in ages. I have Caps Lock mapped to Ctrl (as it is a vastly more useful a key than Esc and Caps Lock is a much better position for it and is just as an extraneous as Esc is). I use Ctrl-C or Ctrl-[ to exit insert mode and it works just…

The first thing that came to my mind was what will Vim users do without an escape key. When did you switch to the Caps Lock mapping? How long did it take you to get use to it?

I'm a vim user as well, and I'm actually shocked at how many users apparently still use the ESC key. I actually didn't know any regular vim users did that, because to me, it seems super inefficient. I don't say that as a put-down or anything like that. But if you use vim, I'd highly recommend remapping caps lock to Esc. I think you will get used to it within a day and will never go back.

Re: New MacBook Pro Is Not a Laptop for Developers Anymore

#670

Post by kentt » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #119

jdc0589 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting you do this, for legal reasons blah blah blah, but putting together a hackintosh is pretty easy these days if you really like osx.

How easy is it to maintain? Last I heard every update breaks everything.

I used a hackintosh for a year for development. It took a day to setup, which is of course a lot more work than for a typical osx experience. However, once setup it was better than the mac pro I was using. Might have even been more stable. Upgrades were a bit of a hassle, but not horrible.