I had this crazy idea a few months ago which Joey's post about muscle memory reminded me of.

For those not in the US, our keyboards have ` and ~ on the key to the left of 1. I prefer this key to be Esc. Long ago I simply swapped the two keys, but the original "Esc" key is always in some weird and inconsistent place and reaching for ~ became as annoying as reaching for Esc. (I suppose I might not care if I didn't use a unix shell or regular expressions or bit masks or...)

So, noting that I mostly only wanted that key for ~, and not `, I came up with the following (in xmodmap form):

keycode 49 = Escape asciitilde grave Escape

This means: if you just hit the key, it does the Right Thing (Esc, as if I were on a real unixy keyboard). If you hold Shift and press the key, it also does the Right Thing (~, as if I were on a PC). But what to do about `, or Shift-Esc, which are no longer possible? We make them the alternate graphs (just old down AltGr. I think the xkb option to put this on right Alt is "grp:switch"). I honestly use those two infrequently enough that I don't care about having to remember the extra bucky.

(I tend to type $(cmd) in the shell, and not `cmd`, because I use the former in scripts and I always found the latter harder to read. I suppose I would care more if I used Lisp or Haskell or...)

What I like most about this solution is that it lets me use the same muscle memory on all my hardware. Never mind weird Esc positions; laptop vendors still can't agree on the correct order of Fn and Control. But you don't have to care if you put Control on Caps Lock. Same idea. It does feel a bit like cheating, but it has made my wrists far more comfortable.

Oh, and to wean myself off the key way out in the corner:

keycode 9 = NoSymbol

Now the question, of course (getting back to Joey), is what would happen if my "new" Escape key broke. I guess I'd have to keep the laptop at home and plug in my Happy Hacking Keyboard :-)

I cleaned the house today and vacuumed out my keyboard because it seriously needed it. And since I had the keycaps off... well, I decided this might be a good time to switch to the dark side. We’ll see how long this lasts.

I have no idea why the keycap part mattered, because I haven’t actually looked down yet, just at this image of the keymap.

vi is a bit weird.

Brown paper bag bugs cause you to scramble to get a fixed version out as soon as possible, which causes more bugs and that causes more grief, which causes you to screw up the upload. I suck. Maybe we should discourage being your own upstream.

I have a line in my ~/devel/TODO under aewm that says “UPDATE THE FUCKING VERSION NUMBER IN aewm.h YOU DOLT”. Will I remember to read it? Who knows?

I just installed Bitlbee and added 14 lines to said file for that, but the one line for ghosd has priority.

<decklin> but that will actually be FUN unlike hacking gaim which is AWFUL

Yeah, that’s why, mainly. I think I just need to be more professional.

So I’ve been good about putting new projects into version control. What I’ve been bad about is not putting new projects into version control until they actually run and I'm no longer tearing them up from top to bottom every time I add something. Like all milestones, the definition of “run” just keeps getting pushed further back the harder you look at it.