No, you're using the computer wrong. See, you should use a tiling window manager with several workspaces and shortcuts without having to look at your keyboard, e.g. Meta+4 to go to workspace 4 where you have your chat apps.
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Function keys productivity trick
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Re: Function keys productivity trick
#72No, you're using the computer wrong. See, you should use a tiling window manager with several workspaces and shortcuts without having to look at your keyboard, e.g. Meta+4 to go to workspace 4 where you have your chat apps.
Any recommendation for Mac?
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#73No, you're using the computer wrong. See, you should use a tiling window manager with several workspaces and shortcuts without having to look at your keyboard, e.g. Meta+4 to go to workspace 4 where you have your chat apps.
Is your tiling-manager also automatically focusing a window on that workspace? And are workspaces limited to a single screen, or do all screen simultaneously change state? Because those are the main reasons why I switch to specific apps instead of desktops/workspaces/tags/whatever you call it. Apps are reliable, but desktops seem too heavy and pointless for me.
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#74I remap the useless caps lock to AltGr and then customize the whole keyboard. Mostly for unicode characters, but some shortcuts too—especially those F keys. I'm using Linux and do it with xkb. Can write a blog article if anyone is interested.
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#75If macOS didn't added a very annoying fade-out/fade-in delay when switching Spaces, you could simply use them with maximized apps and hotkeys for switching them. Another design mistake from Apple.
Is there any way to change the delay for that? I would think that tucked away somewhere under the hood there’s a setting that controls the animation duration. Being able to turn that down or off would be a boon to my productivity.
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Re: Function keys productivity trick
#76I remap the useless caps lock to AltGr and then customize the whole keyboard. Mostly for unicode characters, but some shortcuts too—especially those F keys. I'm using Linux and do it with xkb. Can write a blog article if anyone is interested.
It seems adding en-dash to your repertoire might be of interest :^)
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#77I remap the useless caps lock to AltGr and then customize the whole keyboard. Mostly for unicode characters, but some shortcuts too—especially those F keys. I'm using Linux and do it with xkb. Can write a blog article if anyone is interested.
It seems adding en-dash to your repertoire might be of interest :^)
Good call, updated and added to my layout :) Using em dash though.
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#78In this kind of discussion people often focus solely on frequent actions, but there is one class of action that should have priority for the limited keys: the infrequent urgent. That is, tasks that don't happen that often, but when they do they are very urgent. For me the best example is the sound volume controls, I don't change sound volume nearly as often as I alternate between apps, but when I need to change the s…
That is a fine use, but multimedia keys use 3-7ish (depending on how crazy you go) of the 48-ish function keys readily available. By which I mean, unmodified, SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT, and that's without counting multiple modifiers. I've got volume, mute, pause, fast forward and reverse in there but it's far from the only things I've got. (Well... technically FF, reverse, and pause are WIN-right, WIN-left, and WIN-up respectively, but same principle.) I'm not even close to using up all the function keys.
I've mapped these in something like the last four window managers I use, and they've survived across probably a dozen physical keyboards now. Physical buttons for these things come and go but "WIN-Up" (or Super-Up if you prefer) has always been there.
(I did use a mac with a touch bar for a bit. Was that ever a train wreck for me, as you might expect. Fortunately, people don't seem to be copying them and dumping the function keys. I'm actually perfectly happy with them being a reduced-height bar across the top, as most laptops seem to have now. They don't need to be full height.)
In general, I say to anyone who makes a living on a computer... take control of your keyboard! I don't obsess on not using the mouse at all, but the keyboard can do a lot. There's a lot of keys on there, even ignoring the letter keys (which are densely enough "taken" by a lot of other things I don't tend to override them much).
Re: Function keys productivity trick
#79I’ve tried _so_ many different desktop workflows (including writing two custom window managers!), and I’ve finally settled for the exact same workflow - F -keys bound to my most common apps, all fullscreened. It becomes muscle memory within two weeks, and it’s faster than anything else I’ve tried by a mile. I use Thor for MacOS if anyone wants to replicate it, it’s a no-fuss version of the author’s setup. If I ever d…
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Re: Function keys productivity trick
#80I use the same concept in Emacs/EXWM to launch/jump/bury X11 and native buffers, + mod.+keys for extras like F5 run notmuch, C-F5 access unread tag directly, M-F5 compose a new message etc.
That's why I damn HATE the disappearance of classic MANY-keys keyboards...