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Comment by Brometheus | Hacker News Reader

I tried to switch to Linux for philosophical and customization reasons. Found it nearly impossible to configure stuff reliably and such it wont crash in new interesting ways. For example: Create a new keyboard layout and have it appear in KDE keyboard settings. Good luck. Input Manager for macOS: done.

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> Input Manager for macOS: done.

Funny you should say that, it literally just took me hours to create a new kb layout (my keyboard has a broken P key that I wanted to substitute). It was a mess of error messages and "keyboard already existing" problems. Ugh.

But then try to get the shoulder buttons of a Logitech MX518 to work in the web browser on Mac OS X. That's a task that might take hours. Or try to let the Home and End keys of an external keyboard behave the same way in the terminal and in any other UI text box. There's a lot of configuration required.

It's interesting how different people can have completely opposite experience. I've modified my Microsoft keyboard that zoom slider works as Spotify control buttons play/stop/next. I doubt I would be able to achieve something like this in macOS or Windows. It works all the time, super reliably.

https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a08...

You can probably use Autohotkey to achieve the same thing on Windows. It's a great tool to be aware of should you ever have to use Windows for any reason – you can also use it to push windows to virtual desktops and others, approaching a more Linux-y experience. Someone even wrote a tiling WM in AHK: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

AHK is the kind of thing that should have been built into desktop environments since '95. Why go through the trouble of adding all these workflow features that may or may not align with what actually makes the user's workflow better when you could add a scripting environment that allows the user to do that for themselves and a few pre-configured defaults.

That's funny, I've been using Dvorak on KDE since probably around 1998. Works fine.

AFAIK you cannot create a new keyboard layout in macOS. How did you do?

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