I often read about all those RSI problems and then how pinky fingers have a lot of duties. I find it strange. I type at decent speed and I barely use my pinky fingers at all. I press Caps-Lock, Tab, Shift and Enter with them as well as | and }. Pinkies are small and weak, why use them so much? That's surely neither ergonomic nor the fastest way to type.
It also means I don't like the idea of a split keyboard. I reach across quite often. I've never recorded myself to be 100% sure about all the keys but I am regularly reaching for b and y with both hands depending on the word. This way "typo" is just two quick "progressing" taps - "ty" with the left hand and "po" with the right. Of course "po" is way more comfortable with a ring-middle finger instead of a pinky/ring finger.
The whole idea of assigning keys to fingers doesn't sound too smart to me. Why would you type "ce" with the same finger? It's neither fast nor ergonomic.
Why do it to yourself?
>Home row mods live in the base layer. In my opinion, home row mods are nearly essential to make a layout this small work well. The idea is simple: your home row keys act as normal keys when tapped, but double as modifiers when held.
I feel this is underexplored idea. After remapping my CapsLock to tap=Esc, hold=ctrl it went from the least used key on my keyboard to the most used one. I really like the idea of also doing it with home row keys, that must be very convenient after getting used to. That also seems completely free as you never (I think) hold those keys during normal computer use.
Only issue with home row key combos is the letter comes out delayed since it’s now waiting for keyup event to register single press vs keydown for a combo. You don’t notice that with caps lock remapping because caps lock doesn’t output anything.
This is definitely a fair point with home row mods, which I left out on the blog. ZMK has has had the best configs to manage the timings for me. It requires some tweaking based your typing speed.
Oh that's a good point!
I forgot I actually tried it with jj or kj combos in VIM to exit insert mode and it was a bit annoying. That is before I found a way to re-map CapsLock to a dual duty key on Windows (I am using WSL2 but remaps go through Windows).
Is this actually such a big point? I feel like (subjectively) on Ubuntu everything gets updated just as fast, and even if not, there's a new full release every 6 months. Or is this actually rather slow in comparison to Feroda?
I've also only used Debian based stuff my whole life and even moving from apt to dnf or whatever it was causes too much friction for me haha, though it's not that bad obviously, if I really would see the positives.
I guess it depends. I find it annoying when I read about some feature and then it turns out the package is several versions behind the newest one and I can't try it without jumping hoops to install it from some alternative source.
That happened with GCC and ImageMagick to me on Ubuntu and I swiftly uninstalled it :)
I guess the reason is that the most interesting part of the problem is implementing non-biased selection from 0 to n and once you have done it you just want to use the number so it's natural to choose from the beginning of the array and swap to the last position beyond that.
It also starts instantly every time (that requires removing Edge and web results from there). I use it as an app launcher only. The only missing touch is a fuzzy search but I can live without it.
I've spent too much time on it. There are tools that do it for you if you trust them (like Windhawk).
>>I haven't used Win11 enough to discover how they have managed to further degrade the experience, but at least it looks nicer.
It's an anti-pattern over anti-pattern over anti-pattern. There is a trap waiting for you at every corner. At this point it's hard to imagine them not losing the whole consumer PC market to Apple and maybe some gaming friendly Linux distros. It will take a decade or so but once the snowball starts it will not turn back.
I don't think it's only about power users only. They forced S0 sleep but didn't are about making sure it doesn't crash the system because of some misbehaving driver or failed Windows update. Normal users don't like seeing everything gone and the computer restarting when they open the lid. That doesn't happen on Macs. It won't happen on Valve sponsored Linux distro either.
Was the original menu so bad? Your one has zero discoverability, which is the main feature of the old menu, and something which was degraded, but not completely killed off on the newer versions.
I don't need discoverability. I know what I have on my computer. I need it to be reliable, fast and not distract me with junk.
Maybe most people need discoverability, the problem is that with the new design all they will discover is ads for Microsoft's products :)
>>Was the original menu so bad?
The original has ads, flashy banners and opens with lag half the time. Yes, it's that bad.
I've spent several days trying to get Pro version to usable state.
By usable I mean that it doesn't kill my work session because some random app I've never installed, used or asked for fails its auto-update in the middle of the day and kills the WSL process.
It still has magically resetting settings so if you are not careful telemetry/ads/spying will be back on the menu. It still has hostile settings to keep your computer connected when it sleeps which are very hard to turn off.
There are multiple settings in Windows that are hidden which only appear in the menu when you add a registry entry.
There are so many anti-patterns in Windows it feels like defending against a determined hacker who tries to make your life worse and is hunting for a slight misstep to turn the shit back on.
Group Policy Edit is the way to restrict many things. Disabling automatic updates helps. I have had forced reboots very rarely, I believe that were severe vulnerability fixes.
But my use case is never 24/7, I hibernate it overnight and every time I leave for longer than going to a grocery shop, and I have several Proxmox boxes with proper OSes for hosting stuff. Windows + WSL is my dev/media/web/files/OneDrive machine, a compact silent SFF box that is powerful enough for 90+% of my daily tasks. Lately I try Linux Desktop on Fedora/Ubuntu with every major version, however RDP server and secure boot that I can trust to work and not break myself - these things remain unsatisfactory.
I disabled auto updates by pinning the target version in group policy and then finding some hacks on the web to make it always ask before download. I've run many other random scripts and then found Windhawk to remove more annoyances (taskbar and sections of start menu).
I then shut down more things and disabled Bluetooth on lock. It is now usable and doesn't crash but feels very fragile. I will soon face dilemma of allowing "feature" updates or be out of security ones.
They can't do it having access to the code but somehow people without access to the code [1] can still hack the solution and actually not only move it but also personalize it, change its size, use small/big icons or, my personal preference, hide it so it never appears by moving the mouse alone (only if you ask for it pressing Windows key).
Impossible to get wrong with a modern compiler that will warn you on that or LSP that will scream the moment you type ; and hit enter/esc.
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