Quotes of the week

[Posted June 22, 2016 by n8willis]

Seriously, "rock stars" are arrogant narcissists. Plumbers keep us all from getting cholera. Build functional infrastructure. Be a plumber.

— Molly Sauter

Yup, editing everything by hand. You just need a magnetized needle and a steady hand. I'm still learning to use C-x M-c M-butterfly though, haven't mastered that yet.

— Eric Engestrom (Thanks to Rob Clark.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 24, 2016 12:57 UTC (Fri) by mina86 (guest, #68442) [Link] (13 responses)

Clearly. It's actually M-x butterfly RET.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2016 6:24 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link] (12 responses)

No man, that’s touching twelve keys (on both sides of the keyboard)! That’s how acolytes do it.

C-x M-c M-butterfly means: Type C-x M-c, keep Meta down, then induce your trained butterfly to wave its wings just so that the rest of the necessary keys are pressed. That’s real mastery of the human-butterfly interface, but takes only four keystrokes, and only one hand.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2016 13:31 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (11 responses)

> C-x M-c, keep Meta down

I see this and wonder how Emacs users don't end up with severe wrist pain after a few years. How do you chord this? To me it is:

C-x: pinky+index
M-c: thumb+index

I can feel a tendon moving unnaturally with the rotation to get the thumb in there with the index finger in that position. When my index finger is free, e.g. for a Ctrl+Alt combo, I don't feel that (the other key for such a shortcut is usually found using the other hand). But then, I also have longer fingers why may not fit in such a cramped space as well.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2016 15:00 UTC (Wed) by mina86 (guest, #68442) [Link] (10 responses)

First thing you do is rebind Caps Lock to act as Control. Caps Lock is in the top 5 of most useless keys and having Control on home row is much more useful. <shameless-plug> http://mina86.com/2009/more-control-no-caps-lock/ </shameless-plug>

Second thing you do if you find yourself using an awkward key binding often is rebind it! It’s your editor, customise it to suite you.

Also remember that ‘ESC x’ can be substituted for any ‘M-x’.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2016 15:22 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (5 responses)

I have capslock as backspace (used Colemak for a while and that stuck), so that's already taken :) .

> http://mina86.com/2009/more-control-no-caps-lock/

FYI, you can use udev to do transformations at the event level, so that such things work even on the TTY and you don't have to configure both X, Wayland, modify keyboard mappings or anything else.

Drop a file 99-kb-capslock.hwdb file into /etc/udev/hwdb.d with the contents:

evdev:input:b0003v24F0p0140e0110-*
KEYBOARD_KEY_70039=backspace

To figure out the first line, run evtest as root, select your keyboard and look for a line such as:

Input device ID: bus 0x3 vendor 0x24f0 product 0x140 version 0x110

This turns into the ID above. The values must be padded to 2 bytes and hex characters must be uppercase.

The nice thing about this is that it works even if the keyboard is plugged in while X is running (setxkbmap does not apply to input devices added after the command is run).

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 29, 2016 15:22 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Note that the KEYBOARD_KEY_... line should be indented.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 30, 2016 13:45 UTC (Thu) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

Heh, nice. Now I can ensure that on shared machines the other users get a sane layout, too. ☺

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 1, 2016 12:23 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Awesome cheers. My loadkeys loginrc stuff stopped working ages ago (used to be you could remap console as a normal user; then that was taken away). Hadn't got round to digging into how to do this in the udev world. Cheers :).

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 1, 2016 12:35 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (1 responses)

> you can use udev to do transformations at the event level, so that such things work even on the TTY and you don't have to configure both X

You can also do this on the hardware level

https://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards...

Happy Hacking Keyboard. No caps lock, control to the left of "A", no arrow keys, proper diamond on the Super key instead of a shameful Windows logo. Also available with blank keycaps for extra fun.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 2, 2016 11:36 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Sure. I love my Das keyboards though. And yep, blank :) .

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 4, 2016 10:27 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Caps lock is only in the top 5 of most useless keys if you don't touch-type. If you touch-type, particularly if you're using a normal QWERTY keyboard with right-shift in a terrible location, it's really very frequently used, particularly when writing languages like C that SHOUT_A_LOT. The rule is, if you ever have to hold down shift for more than one or two chords, you should be using caps lock instead. I would no more consider rebinding it than I would consider rebinding the shift keys.

Myself, I ran out of keys a while back, even with an entire numeric keypad to override, so got a foot pedal. Downside: it's cheap and terrible (it emits key-pressed *and* released when you depress it, and nothing when you release it). But using the footswitch daemon to make it emit Hyper_R and using XKb to make Hyper_R (but *not* _L) a sticky key, it's quite useful for initiating runs of window-manager operations that usually require chording. (It's not so much use for anything else because of the lack of proper press/release functionality.)

(If anyone knows of a foot pedal that doesn't have insane ergonomic price tags but can be programmed from Linux and supports proper press/release, I'd be very glad to know of it.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 4, 2016 10:35 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

For sequences of all-cap words, I will usually either use inter-buffer word completion ("<C-x><C-n>"), or type it lowercase and then use "gU" to edit it. There's no reason keys have to be input directly in their output format.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 8, 2016 5:40 UTC (Fri) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] (1 responses)

(If anyone knows of a foot pedal that doesn't have insane ergonomic price tags but can be programmed from Linux and supports proper press/release, I'd be very glad to know of it.)

I don't know of such a product.

But if you are really into this, building one using an arduino or a similar board for the USB interface and dumb pedals as actuators should be easy and reasonably cheap.

Just google for "arduino usb keyboard library" and have fun!

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 9, 2016 0:20 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Here's a silly idea: get the pedal off one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rockband-drumset.jpg — it has a 3.5mm jack to connect to the main unit, and can be plugged straight into a sound card's line in and used like a pulse-dialling telephone. It ought to be possible to do some uinput trickery with that...