Small stupid things that make up my dev environment | Hacker News Reader

Small stupid things that make up my dev environment

rachelbythebay.com

92 pointsblfr48 comments

It's these small, stupid things that actually were the reason why I couldn't hack it on a Macbook.

You just get stuck in your ways when everything is set up _just right_, and the little things that Macs do that Linux didn't, and vice versa, just drove me up the wall, even though it was small and stupid.

I think I understand what you’re saying.

I’m a big trackpad guy. The only one in my office. I love my gestures on macOS, and use all kinds of them to do my work.

Recently yet another computer was added to my desk by IT for a new project. This one is an HP laptop with Ubuntu.

I’m sure Ubuntu is a great thing and I’ll love it when I get used to it. But the HP’s keyboard and trackpad are terrible, and using the machine completely disrupts my usual workflow. I miss my gestures. I miss being able to define actions way out to F19. I miss knowing that a swipe will always be a swipe, and not a scroll.

We get set in our ways, especially when those ways are very productive and make sense to us. Having to switch to a different set of muscle memories is problematic.

> when everything is set up _just right_

That's why I'm still using Enlightenment DR16 as my window manager, with the same theme/config I've been slowly customizing for ~20 years. Every time I try a different windows manager (including any enlightenment >= E17) it feels like an incomplete toy, not the feature-rich tool I'm familiar with.

I did try to switch from e16 to e17 multiple times (on Gentoo), but I always had to rollback; I never found a bugfree version of e17.

(sometimes in 2018 I had to switch away from e16 (got taken out from Gentoo's main package repo) and I ended up using XFCE. It's a pity that e17 never really worked, at least for me => I wonder if they'll ever publish a really stable version)

I’ve actually become so used to the Mac over the years that I prefer it. I like having a clear separation between Ctrl and Cmd, and the only thing I install for a different “feel” is Moom (for tiling windows with the same hotkeys I use on Linux or Windows).

But, again, I’m a vim+tmux guy, so the only real annoyance is the lack of a real Esc key.

I'm using Capslock as (additional) Esc key.

I've had success with this situation in the past by working in a vm or docker container.

Yup. It’s the reason I’ll never buy a laptop with that stupid touchbar.

The idea of programming in green text on a black background with no syntax highlighting makes me shudder.

I think it's something similar to the Stockholm sindrome. It's literally hurting your eyes but you are so used to the pain you don't want to let it go :)

Joke aside, I remember when Green was the only colour my monitor could produce. And it felt great only because the other option was not using a computer at all.

I did it back in the olden days, on everything from Wyse and Wang terminals to a Commodore 64 and an IBM XT with MDA display.

I haven’t done it that way in years, but this article makes me want to try it again. I wonder if all that highlighting is actually making me less focused. I guess I’ll find out later this week.

I can't see how you can get more productive by removing a channel of information from yourself though.

Using this kind of rational-choice-based theory assumes complete control of the way your brain processes information and the channels it chooses to focus on, which simply isn't accurate.

For a reductio ad absurdum, if you had a book in which each word was in bold purple iff its Scrabble score was divisible by 5, I don't think it would be controversial that removing that channel of information would make you more productive.

It would if it was a Scrabble dictionary.

Very true, and completely irrelevant. We're talking about a counterexample to a universal claim, not a universal claim that runs counter to the original claim. The comment I responded to said (paraphrased) "I don't see how you could be more efficient by removing a channel of information", and this is what I disputed, providing a theoretical explanation and a simple example. The fact that examples in the contrary direction exist (as you point out) is not disputed by anyone.

FWIW, as far as the specific upthread topic goes: despite generally preferring a pretty barebones development environment, I prefer syntax highlighting.

The idea is that if everything is highlighted then your brain adapts and stops paying as much attention to highlighted elements. Many colorschemes use too much colors. It is not uncommon to have one line be highlighted with red because of an asynchronous linter warning, and many other words with purple because they are keywords like 'class', 'def', 'do', 'end', and so on. And there are a bunch of other colors everywhere else. Some people ask themselves "Do I really want to highlight syntax elements? If there is a syntax mistake, my editor will immediately tell me anyway, and it will be much more prominent if I have a clean uniform sheet of code."

I've been using minimalist colorscheme for more than a year now. To me it highlights only what matters: mistakes are red, code is dark and uniform, comments are faded, current line is highlighted, search matches have their own color. That's it for the most part. There are some subtleties that are also handled.

Minimal highlighting is beautiful and clean. Too much color is ugly and messy. Just become clean! Remove your wallpaper, remove those tiny ugly icons from your toolbar, find minimal colorscheme, install tiling window manager, take a bath.

Exactly, thats why I always have all TVs on, youtube on my third monitor, and twitch on my phone. I get stuff doner than anyone I know.

Works just as well now as it did back when it was the only choice. I like the simplicity; it can be less distracting.

I am 5'6 and I have found I like a desk about 24-26" off the ground so I can sit with my feet flat on the floor and hands in my lap at the keyboard without shoulders hunched. Hard to find!

I have my old Aeron which I don't really love vertical adjustment nearly as low as it can go.

I have found I like a desk about 24-26" off the ground so I can sit with my feet flat on the floor and hands in my lap at the keyboard without shoulders hunched

My company has an ergonomics consultant who comes to each desk once a year and observes posture, foot position, etc... then recommends changes in desks and seating for each person. It’s the first place I’ve worked that does this. Someone said it was somehow tied in with our health insurance company.

I have the exact same issue. A sit-stand desk with a wide height range has saved my back. The biggest challenge left is finding a chair that’s shallow enough to sit at the back of (for proper lumbar support) and still be able to bend your knees.

Try adding a nice extra-tall laptop riser too. Typical ones tend to be 6-12” too low once the desk is no longer too high for typing.

Have a riser to recommend?

I use one of these ones that are intended as standing desk converters:

https://www.uncagedergonomics.com/standing-desks/

It looks horrible, but at work I’ve been putting packs of A4 paper under the too low monitor stands of every flex desk I work at.

sounds like you need a 3M keyboard tray..

I do like my standing desk more though even though its 3x the cost of a good keyboard tray. It's has more flexibility as it can go down to 24" and up to 50" More importantly it's useful for more than just typing.. writing, soldering, etc.

Any links for the standing desk? 3m keyboard tray looks perfect. I had a great keyboard tray at Nortel in the nineties and all my workstations have been sub par since then.

https://www.fully.com/jarvis-standing-desk.html

That's what I have but to be honest I think most of similar design all use jiecang frames from China.

Will your feet know the difference if it isn't really the floor they're flat on?

Yes because I like to move my legs around a bit to the sides too and those little foot stools are too small.

Or I roll away from the keyboard to use pen and paper and then have to move The foot rest.

Anyone not coding on a 4K or higher monitor should complain.

They’re not that expensive now, and the text is so much sharper. You might not notice the difference with a 4k TV on the other side of a room, but you will with a 28 inch screen a couple of feet in front of you.

I don't like native 4k. Text rendering is too small for me.

If I have to go native, 1440p or QHD ultrawides would be the best.

But 4k scaled down in MacOS is great too!

The intent is to use the extra resolution for detail not to fit more on the screen. Unfortunately most software is still designed for back when we didn't have enough real-estate and so Linux is not very good at DPI scaling. Windows used to be just as bad but has gotten better slowly over time.

Mac has always handled this perfectly from the get-go.

You have to set DPI that is appropriate for your screen size. If you keep using the default 90 DPI with a 15" 4K screen, the text will for sure be small because it is rendered as if the screen is about 49".

DPI means dots per inch. It's a physical property of an LCD screen (well, technically, that would be called PPI - pixels per inch, but it's the same concept). I'm not sure how one would be able to set the DPI. At least not without really bad shenanigans blurring everything in the process.

Isn't the solution for "small letters on high pixel density screen" scaling as mentioned by arvinism or simply increasing the font size?

Like you said, DPI (or PPI) is a physical property of a screen. You don't set it for the screen, you just let your text rendering software know the DPI so that it could get the absolute text size (in mm) correctly. Let's consider two 15.6" screens: 1. 1366x768, ~100 DPI 2. 1920x1080, ~141 DPI

When rendering a piece of text in a certain font size on both screens without specifying correct DPI (e.g., leaving the default DPI value of 90), the text on both screens will take up the same amount of pixels, but the absolute size in mm will be different (text on screen 2 will be smaller because pixels are denser there). If you, however, let your OS know the DPIs of the screens, rendering the same piece of text in the same font size on both screens should lead to the text physically taking up roughly the same area of the screen (as much same as it could be, taking into account the fact that pixels are discrete). This is true because point[1] is an absolute unit of measurement.

To give you an example, when I switched from 1366x768 15.6" laptop to 1920x1080 15.6" laptop I specified the new screen DPI in my desktop environment font appearance settings. This made all the text be roughly same size as on the old laptop, only smoother due to greater pixel density.

> Isn't the solution for "small letters on high pixel density screen" scaling as mentioned by arvinism or simply increasing the font size?

This way you must render a picture as if the screen has higher DPI, then scale it down to match the desired DPI, you still have DPI in play here, and absolute text size implications described above apply here as well. You can use scaling for antialiasing, though.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)

Thanks for the explanation!

For the typematic delay, I have no clue why it is so slow on Linux by default. Probably somebody has set those values 30 years ago and then nobody cared to update them. I use 'xset r rate 200 40' and when I use another Linux computer, typing feels just broken, super slow (Windows has better defaults than Linux in this regard). The weird part, there is no reason why keystrokes should have such a huge delay. Changing the xset values improves the user experience in a quite dramatic way.

This seems great. How did I not know this. Trying it out right away.

EDIT: I adjusted it a little to have fewer repetitions per second but lowering the delay is amazing. What a great thing to find in your HN stocking. Merry Christmas!

Where do you put this magical "xset r rate 200 40" on a modern Linux desktop?

~/.bashrc is the wrong place for sure (I might not even be running X!)

~/.Xresources seems like it would be the right place but it's a command so that won't work...

I have it in my i3 config: exec --no-startup-id sleep 2 && /usr/bin/xset r rate 200 40

While my ~/.xinitrc and ~/.xsession have been ignored for some time, Debian-based distros seem to use ~/.xsessionrc these days.

Could it be related to the teletype origins of Linux terminals? If you're on a slow line, you'll notice the difference more if your repeat rate is higher.

Maybe but nowadays you can use mosh[1] and it's not an issue any more.

[1] https://mosh.org/

My own small thing is my personal keyboard. I have both a mechanical and non-mechanical personal keyboard, mind you. They cost me a pretty penny ($100+ for each), and I wouldn't expect an employer to spend that easily. So I can just provide my own.

I have really long arms overall and normal keyboards force me to both put my wrists at really weird angles and turn and twist my elbows to get my hands to fit there. Something like the Microsoft Natural was a decent-ish width, but the Kinesis advantage or the Ergodox are just amazing. It's funny to watch too - people are kinda scared to touch a Kinesis advantage "because it's split and weird", but they start touch-typing quickly and start arranging the keyboard parts as it is comfortable in small steps as well. You just nudge the keyboard part instinctively with your thumb or your pinky to make it more comfortable.

When setting up a Linux VM to work from, I usually go with OpenBox, LXterminal and FBPanel and call it a day:

https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-templates/tree/master/deskt...

Building a portable setup is a lot easier these days with Docker, but over the years I started paring down stuff to vim+tmux (which work fine inside WSL) and sharing my dotfiles across the Mac, Linux and Windows.

The one thing that gets me every time, though, is having a working SSH keychain. I want to log in once and have ssh-agent just work, and it seems like every year I have to re-learn another way to do it (which is fine, but annoying).

Desks without modesty panels are a feature of offices without due consideration for personal privacy.

I was able to get by with white on black terminal before.

But nowadays, I can't stand coding if the editor doesn't have syntax highlighting.

Same with being able to put the cursor over a variable name and automatically highlight all of them used in the same scope. Can't live without that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com