Ask HN: What new skills have you learned since shelter-in-place started? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What new skills have you learned since shelter-in-place started?

We don't know yet when could COVID-19 pandemic ends, so picking up a new skill or learning a new programming language/technology could be worth the use of your time. What new skills have you learned or started learning so far? If you are a developer, what learning resources do you recommend?

View on HN

I've had the time to start writing a book in earnest. I've used LaTeX extensively in the past -- albeit not in the past 5 years or so.

* Refreshed my knowledge of LaTeX using the lualatex engine

* Learned how to use the Memoir class

* Learned how to use the subfiles package (highly recommended!)

* Learned how to version control my chapters using Mercurial / MacHg

* Learned how to use the Zettelkasten tool The Archive

* Switched from Terminal to iTerm2

* Switched (mostly) from regular vim to MacVim (love it)

* Discovered and am using vifm, the vi-oriented file manager (the type of classic nerdy Unix tool I love!)

* Started using Typinator to ease work with The Archive

* Started using aspell - a great spell checker

Wow, that's a lot!

Thanks for sharing, especially iTerm2 and MacVim.

A couple of tips for iTerm2:

1. iTerm2 looks in .bash_profile at start-up, not in .bashrc.

I imagine your system is the same, but I found the following advice in a forum which was pretty clever, I thought. If you have both a .bash_profile and a .bashrc and you're wondering which one iTerm2 is sourcing, type

export BASH_CONF="bash_profile"

somewhere in .bash_profile and

export BASH_CONF="bashrc"

in .bashrc. Then open up a new iTerm2 window and type

echo $BASH_CONF

on the command line to see which one got set.

2. Being able to select something with the mouse and then paste it with a right-mouse click is great. Here's the right way of setting it up:

a. Open iTerm's Preferences

b. General> Selection> Check "Copy to pasteboard on selection" (for me this was the default)

c. Pointer> Bindings> Double-click on "Right button single click"; Select "Paste from Clipboard"

The _wrong_ way to do it would have been to just set up the right button click to paste from selection. That would be bad because you would lose the ability to paste something that you had copied, say, using Cmd-C in a Word document.

I think I'm getting a better handle on my anxiety issues. Also, I played with Legos for the first time in a long time.

Good for you. This is the part that I struggle the most, I quarantined for more almost a month and depression and anxiety kicks in the most when you are alone.

Baking bread using a sourdough starter instead of yeast; noodling about with NodeMCU (really fun and dirt cheap) and BBC Micro:Bit (really fun, not as cheap as NodeMCU but still pretty cheap, and really easy for younger people to get started with); and I've just started pencil sketching. I'm an absolute total beginner, but it's enjoyable.

A nice sourdough bread recipe with hi-res photos:

https://github.com/hendricius/the-bread-code/blob/master/bas...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com