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 installed Ubuntu on the kitchen laptop this week, and haven't touched anything (in order to see how well it works without checking out my dotfiles or editing stuff by hand), so whenever I go to put on some tunes or consult a recipe I get a standard GNOME desktop. How does the rest of the world manage to use computers? I feel lost without

• Emacs keyboard shortcuts in text boxes (I don't know where you turn this on if not in a custom RC file)
• A middle mouse button (I have no idea why emulating it didn't happen, I couldn't manage to configure synaptics)
• Focus follows mouse (this one's easy to find and set, though)
• A Control key I can reach without contorting my wrist (this is also quickly settable, but not as dead-obvious)

I wouldn't be able to get any serious work done here. Just moving some text between two windows takes ages.

I guess if the rest of the world asked me why you would want these things I wouldn't have a good sound byte explanation. They are, after all, mostly habits I acquired years before GNOME was even in Debian. And anyone switching to your favorite system is going to wonder how the hell you work without X, Y, and Z.

At work, my users who are pretty good at this unix thing use vi, presumably because when the department's sysadmin, who still uses Solaris, told everyone to use PINE, also told everyone to use vi ("here's a manual! have fun! hahaha!"), and that got passed down through the years. So whenever I'm looking over their shoulder I try to tell them one new trick to save them from going arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow backspace-backspace-backspace-backspace-backspace, etc.

That's sort of how I feel on user-friendly computers. arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow. I must be doing this wrong. arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow-arrow. ESC ESC :wq

I logged in this morning and noticed that my XFCE weather applet had disappeared. I moved the pointer over to see what was up, or at least open the menu to add a new one...

A tooltip appeared that said, “fog”.

What a terribly misinformed rant.

Gnome has eight options for what to do with Caps Lock. None of them are “Control”.

Dear Lazyweb,

Does anyone know how to remap Caps Lock to Control in Windows for a specific keymap (e.g. Dvorak) only? The standard thing appears to be hardware-level.

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.

Tip of the day:

.toolbar-primary > toolbarbutton .toolbarbutton-icon {
    padding: 5px !important;
}

More target-acquisition space, no distracting labels. People who write extensions tend to make their labels ridiculous.

Actually, what really bothers me about the GTK+ file dialogs is having to click “Browse for other folders” every single time I open the one for saving. (Last I looked this up, the only solution was to patch GTK+.)

My understanding of all this touchy-feely user-interface stuff is that humans are supposed to be oriented spatially (classic Finder) or by breadcrumbs (Netscape). A tiny little dropdown with a text label of just the current directory's name (not even a full path) gives me no idea whatsoever “where” I am. I constantly save things in the wrong directory from Firefox.

While basename $PWD is all the directory information I put in my shell prompt, I can do considerably more from there, and new shells don’t tend to pop up two hours later when you forgot where you cd’d to last time. What is acceptable for me there is not acceptable for a normal user here. I really don’t get what they were thinking.