I’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 do need to see two things side-by-side, I’ve also got Rectangle for window positioning. A single cmd+caps lock+H/J/K/L for left-half/restore/maximise/right-half is all I’ve found is necessary.
I've fallen all the way down this rabbit hole - from a full-size to a 60% to an ergodox to a CRKBD (36 key split) - and come all the way out again, settling with a chiclet standard qwerty (Apple wireless keyboard).
I think the central hypothesis of using these keyboards is flawed. It seems to all centre around thinking that less movement is better, and that keeping as close to the home row as possible is king, even if that means chording, contorting your hands to reach far keys, and over-relying on your weak pinky fingers.
Human bodies are meant to move. I've found that since I've started dancing over keyboard more with my fingers (a sort of advanced hunt-and-peck using all fingers but the pinky), combined with using a low profile keyboard, my hand pain has disappeared, and I'm at my fastest WPM yet (105). YMMV of course, but it's worth considering if you're peering into the rabbit hole.
Most people don't understand it, or understand it too late, after they have joint pain.
I concur with you on these extremely pared down keyboards. It's a nice and niche optimization for the use cases you have (programming in a certain language, etc.), however the general applicability of the tool dies with every iteration, plus the movement aspect of the body.
I've moved to 75% keyboards because of a combination of minimalism and underutilized numpad (that part literally collects dust), however I'll not move beyond that size, because the F-Row and the standard keyboard layout is both needed and practical.
I have two keyboards (one for work, one for home). A Logitech K380, and a NuPhy Air75, both are nice and compact wireless keyboards with a 75% layout, and they are both comfortable and fast to use.
However, I don't rather comment on people's choices. It's their hobbies and path to exploration. They shall do as they please. Feel bad for the people who suffer RSI though.
I could argue this subject all day! Like you said, I do ultimately think it comes down to personal preference. If you like your setup, you’re going to get more done with less stress.
I really do feel that CRKBD has optimized a particular utility of keyboards (I use one). By having every key no more than one unit away from home, you can always be confident that you’re hitting exactly the right key. This eliminates errors in a way that I personally enjoy more than any alternative. With QMK, layers make full utilization of keycodes trivial. I use 20+ layers, and it’s second nature now that it’s all muscle memory.
I actually moved to an ergodox _because_ of pain. Since moving to a split ergo board my back doesn't hurt and I've stopped getting tingling in my ulnar nerve. Different situations for different people, I suppose
This book actually gets quite a lot of hate on HN as parts of it have been debunked (or are at least heavily argued about): https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
I wouldn't call it "debunked". All these were later answered by author, I don't have sources, but I remember it was on author's blog and also on some podcasts*. I remember that he said all these will be answered also in second edition.
Thank you for sharing, this was an interesting read. I wonder if the rest of the book also suffers from this.
To be fair though (not that it excuses it) but pop-science/livestyle book written by academics to gain more notoriety usually suffer from this issue that a lot could be fixed by doing X. Livespan by David Sinclair also does this by basically pinning everything on aging.
It makes for a good read but I think it's best to always keep a healthy skepticism.
Slightly off topic but I always understood these types of books (scientific, biographical, medical) go through extensive fact checking before legit publishers will publish them. Is that not the case? Or did the author just serve as his own fact checker for that book?
Typography, to me, is one of those things that’s simultaneously incredibly boring and completely fascinating. On the one hand, it’s something you experience (whether consciously or not) for a large part of your day, and each font you read in your day has been meticulously chosen for all the supposed qualities it gives off. But on the other hand - it’s just a bloody font.
I am feeling really dumb for asking: the punchline of the comic is clearly that there is something terribly wrong with the typesetting of the business card, but what is it?
...which is a quite distinctive font that has shipped with Mac systems for years, so someone typeface-conscious is very likely to recognise it on sight.
Out of the box in PowerPoint or Illustrator, you will struggle to set large characters in print unless you manually change character spacing.
I look at the movie titles and think there are mistakes in the spacing and wonder what kind of machine they used to make it.
All the above software is supposed to have automated ‘Kerninq’ of characters but it does not work well enough.
If serif spacing is tight, the letters link together like cursive or Arabic calligraphy and form a meaningful composition. The default rules, however, avoid serifs crashing into each other at all costs, space letters too far apart, and create meaningless white spaces.
> I look at the movie titles and think there are mistakes in the spacing and wonder what kind of machine they used to make it.
They were probably done by hand, especially given the swapping of characters from different fonts.
I've forgotten the name of the company [flir reminds me in the comment below that it was Letraset], but it was common back then (yes, I'm an old fart, though was a kid when that film came out) to have a transparent sheet with adhesive vinyl (? or some other polymer) letters you could transfer over one by one to your workpiece. If you went into a an art supply house there would be racks of these things sorted by font and then size, down at least to 8 point.
Back in 1968 phototypesetting was not super common. It was probably used for some of the larger blocks (like the toilet instructions) although just as likely to have been done with hot lead which survived almost to the end of the 1970s.
It's hard to remember now (this mostly predated my working time since I started with laser printing in the 70s) but medium and large companies often had a lot of paper and data management departments with things like typing pools (completely retyping documents in order to incorporate edits was the state of the art) and print shops (photocopiers were expensive and uncommon into the 70s)
Somewhere in the late 1980s to early 1990s, business culture changed to expect everyone to be able to type and use a computer for that.
The last time I worked for a company where the upper management couldn't type, it was 1996. They all had computers, but the CEO had all email printed out and put in a physical in-tray on his desk; he would scribble comments in red ink or, if the reply was extensive, dictate into a tape recorder for his secretary to type back into an email.
Back in the 80s it was pretty "obvious" that computers wouldn't be used by execs because none of them would type.
I remember in 1982 as a favor for a secretary I wrote a little script that printed out the CEO's email. Before that he would have her type it on letterhead; he would read it and dictate the response. Just being able to print it out in a way he would read (suppress most of the headers, put the date on the right hand edge, etc) saved her an enormous amount of time and effort.
Heh, first time I’ve seen this. I’m of the opinion that as long as you’re not using something wildly out of place like papyrus or comic sans in a professional setting, it’s not hugely impactful what font you choose. You can spend hours comparing the subtle differences between helvetica and ariel but does it really make a difference?
Also unrelated but the shocked dude in the last pane looks way too much like Elon Musk for my liking.
When someone leaves their computer unlocked in my presence, I don't give them new wallpaper. Okay sometimes I still do, but mostly I've moved beyond that.
I think fonts can make a difference where readability or accessibility is important. One example of a bad font choice in the UK is on the signs placed on roads after fatal accidents which ask witnesses to provide information. The contact number is written in a font that looks like a seven-segment display and that is virtually unreadable when you are driving past. The designer must have thought it looked good but it is unreadable.
But it's subjectively the worst font (or layout, or kerning, or aliasing, or something - I'm extremely not an expert:) I've seen since... mid-90's? I don't know HOW they made it look that bad; I checked if they were accidentally-enlarged images, but nope.
In addition to letters looking (subjectively) bad, it also looks strange. Kernings looks slightly off, and the "Small but necessary interruption" feels like it has another 3 fonts in there. Perhaps They're just lighter or narrow variations (again, not an expert), and then the user-added ALL CAPS with different spacing yet... it feels I'm reading 19th century print. Which is quaint, might be precisely what author is looking for (I once spent an hour trying to get letters on a CD look JUST the right amount of offset and wobbly :P ), but feels a bit... old school.
Yeah it's strange, the content is about typography, but something about it is really hard to look at, at least on Mozilla Firefox. On some pages e.g. the typography-in-ten-minutes page it looks like the first paragraph is slightly, but not obviously, larger than the subsequent paragraphs.
Everything seems stretched vertically, and the stuff in all-caps is borderline A E S T H E T I C with the horizontal spacing.
It's not ALL CAPS but sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs[0]. The author uses them as links, perhaps to illustrate this very difference. See also 14, 15 from "Summary of key rules"[1].
Sorry for the nitpick, but at the end that's actually what 90% of typography is all about, tiny details.
The sheer breadth of typography experimentation in latin alphbet is also astounding. Also personal impressed by how much Japanese typographers managed to keep up with trends and culture. Not many scripts out there with good steam / cyberpunk options. Chinese pretty close. Korean seems to be lagging despite hangul being alphabet. Arabic + Hindi... very disappointing (though default beautiful). But that's just cursory exploration.
* That initial "How to use it" diagram completely puts me off the product - it seems dizzyingly complex, and to have that right at the top before I even know what the product is seems like a mistake.
* Consider getting a native speaker to review the text - the grammar is off in a fair few places.
* Write a simpler paragraph for what your product does - I've read through the entire landing page, and your HN comment, and I still don't understand what it is you are selling.
I currently use a third-party git GUI (GitKraken atm) but I also use jetbrains products, am I missing out by not using the integrated git functionality? If so, is there a tutorial or guide you could recommend, or is it all fairly self-explanatory?
The Jetbrains git interface is really quite good. For me the magic is the general combination of git and local history. The search is good and the diffing and jump-to-source from those. The changelist handling is pretty good too.
I think a quick skim of the available features in the docs would probably give a good overview. Then poking around.
Jetbrains Git integration is quite self-explanatory - if you're already using GitKraken, you're not missing out much except being able to do it from your IDE instead of another tool. Maybe conflicts are a tad easier due to same syntax highlighting style and ability to edit on the go.
I went to checkout your profile as I was interested in seeing what products you've made, and I saw on your website you've got a mailto link. I was thinking of adding the same thing to my site, but I'm worried about crawlers picking up my email and using it for spam. Has this happened to you at all - do you get much spam?
This is why I'm cancelling my hey subscription as well. I get that they are upfront about it being a feature, and it sounds great at first, but it's made me paranoid about missing mails now - a feeling I never got with any other service provider. It's a shame, as I got in pretty early and bagged a great account name (firstname @ hey.com). But it's not worth sacrificing my sanity for vanity.
If I ever do need to see two things side-by-side, I’ve also got Rectangle for window positioning. A single cmd+caps lock+H/J/K/L for left-half/restore/maximise/right-half is all I’ve found is necessary.