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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you how Pivotal solves this problem (or used to; my time was years ago): Standardize the configuration. If some special tool is making you more productive, share it with the team and get everyone on board. Don't try to be a special snowflake.

IMO this is the right way to do pair programming. It tends to bring everyone up to speed with the latest tools, and it keeps eccentrics out of the weeds. It's not to everyone's taste, of course. But neither is pair programming.

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Cater to your own needs. "Special snowflakes" would include disabled folk that need special setups. If you need a special setup to avoid RSI or to be more productive, do it.

Folks with disabilities would not be considered in the snowflake category. If a team member needs a certain setup then you have to support them, of course.

Snowflake behavior is being the person who just can't use the terminal if it isn't "set -o vi" keys. Or insisting that Caps Lock be mapped to Ctrl/Esc/etc.

But if you are used to Caps Lock being mapped to Ctrl/Esc/etc and then suddenly it’s not it is actually pretty jarring. I don’t think that’s special snowflake. The problem is that it’s not absolutely trivial for whoever’s currently using the keyboard to put it in whatever mode they’re used to.

Or that people are sharing a physical keyboard and having this problem at all. You can pair program with more than one keyboard.

'Dealing' with Esc for Vim would fall under RSI prevention in my book. Using Vim almost necessitates some form of easier switching modes; swapping Caps Lock, `jj`, etc. are all considered valid and 'normal' for the general Vim community and to say only one or even none of the options are "okay" in the company, well, unless it was my preference this would be an immediate resignation from me. That or the company better be shelling out and allowing time for employees to configure programmable keyboards they can pop in with their keys hardware configured.

Caps lock has to be mapped to the command key, since my IBM Model M physically doesn’t have a command key.

I guess you can call keyboards snowflakey too, but I don’t see why anyone should dictate what keyboard I use in my own home.

The Pivotal sharing station has separate keyboards and mice for each developer. Many people bring their own keyboards and pointing devices. That's fine.

"I can only be productive in emacs" doesn't fly, unless you happen to be paired with the rare snowflake that feels similarly.

and THAT is why i’ve never been interested in applying to pivotal…

Everyone at your organization uses the same text editor and/or IDE?

Pivotal was fairly standardized on Jetbrains tools and VSCode, so yes. Many teams also used a combination of vim and tmux.

Team, not organization. A big team might be 5 pairs. There was no hard rule that everyone had to use the same setup - you'd occasionally see pairs in vim or whatnot - but since you're switching computers and pairs almost every day, you tended to homogenize quickly.

My team standardized on JetBrains. Even if someone is unfamiliar with the IDE, pairing gets them up to speed fast. Humans can learn any dev environment.

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