There were some efforts I’ve done the last years that have repaid multiple times by now, want to mention them here individually and talk some sentences about them.
Order is as follows:
- vim
- tiling window managers
- split keyboards
- keyboard layouts
- declarative operating systems (nixos)
One last comment before starting, the order is taken from the order in which I stumbeled upon them.
vim
As writing is the main work of most knowledge workers it makes sense to optimise that process as much as possible.
You’ll maybe know the struggle of having to click around in huge documents in e.g. word or even overleaf and may be unpleased with that for good reasons.
Using the mouse to click around a screen to go to bits of text and move the cursor is most intuitive but also pretty much as inefficient as it can be given that you have to get your hands off of the keyboard you use to type.
Vim removes all that hassle and instead just gives you dozens of keymappings to jump around and manipulate text with instead.
You won’t need to use a mouse, you won’t have to break your hands,
given you’ve mapped esc to e.g. caps.
After some years of usage it just becomes a natural part of writing. The only bad thing coming from that will be that you occasionally spam vim keybindings into a messanger without looking up and end up writing something very incorrect and useless.
tiling window managers
Using tiling WMs eventually becomes natural like with using vim. Having normally ten desktops accessible at all times and having designated reasons for them is quite worth something. Just makes you not think about where a program could be.
That’s perhaps one of the things that annoyed me the most about macos, either you use the “stage manager” which allows you to focus groups of windows or you just had 20 layers of windows on top of each other without any reasonable overview on them.
Even with tiling window managers it took me some time to figure out how I want to
use them ideally. When I began using WMs – bspwm then, hyprland now – I just made
a new desktop when the current one was full, today I have them designated as follows,
mapped with alt+number:
| desktop no. | category |
|---|---|
| 1 | writing |
| 2 | programming |
| 3 | messenging |
| 4 | music |
| 5 | graphic |
| 6 | bibliography |
| 7 | keepassxc |
| 8 | browser |
| 9 | misc |
Here the order might not make sense on first view but let me explain.
The different “categories” I found after just thinking about it a long time and tweaking it, their numbering was made vaguely on the times of how often I use them. But they’re descending and ascending because when you have your hands on the left and right side of the keyboard it is the hardest to reach the numbers in the middle (here 5 + 6) so I have mapped programs or categories on them which I use the least often as instead just using a linear mapping (1 = most often, 9 = least often).
That way whenever I want to use firefox I just press alt+8 or when I need my
keepass database I know it’s always on alt+7. That way everything is predictable
and even when not looking I’d know where I find what and how to keep order.
split and ergonomic keyboards
About this topic I’ve talked plenty in my dactyl post.
Using split keyboards is nothing that makes you any faster at typing or such, it is a purely ergonomic choice.
Your shoulders, wrists and back will thank you for it, or at least not hurt after years of working with slumped posture.
keyboard layouts
This too is a topic I wrote extensively about before here.
In summary: changing to a modern, optimised layout does give you speed and ergonomic gains but it also takes more time to get used to.
It took me around 3-4 months to get back at the speed I was previously at (70-80wpm) and then it took me another few months to get faster. Am now using it around 15 months and with no extra practice I am comfortably around 90wpm and it feels great to type with.
Can really recommend it if you have the time. In theory it baffled me how less sense it makes that we still type on qwerty for the most part.
nixos
At last we got nixos.
This is a topic or hobby for some that can make you loose countless evenings, but at the time I picked it up (right after finishing high school) I did have the time so nothing got lost due to it.
NixOS showed me countless concepts that I would not have discovered otherwise before being in the industry most likely, it gave me problems that I would have not figured out as soon as I have now, due to it.
Such as e.g. secret management or remote deployment.
I see nixos as the backup for the OS side. Just today I decided I want to install my config on an old thinkpad x220 and within a hand full of commands I could have exactly the same config, settings, down to the wallpaper and keyboard layout on that computer.
That’s the computer I am writing this post on right now (because I really like the keyboard).
NixOS gives you a lot of powerful features, but I often see it primitively as a way to not have to redo OS stuff all the time and remember commands and instead just write it in some config when it works and completetly forget about it.
conclusion
In summary I want to say that for me it was always worth it to follow my intuition on things being unreasonable and then just learning or finding a way to go about changing it.
It often takes some time to get used to it or to change your workflow in certain aspects but given that most of us will do that shit (using computers / programming / writing) for some more decades you might as well optimize how you do it.
I would really like to know what you might have done that I did not think of yet, please reach out at the mail here.