129 karma · joined June 3, 2016
It's amazing that this is possible. I took quite a bit of steering and was definitely not a one prompt endeavor but having a lot of fun with it.
Just add it to your shell config (e.g. `.zshrc`) and use it like so: `$ killport 8080`
Basically an approach that leverages the advantages of utilities and blocks and embracing the `Cascading` in CSS instead of working around it, like BEM et al. likes to do.
I've managed to get up to around 50 wpm coming from 75 wpm with normal qwerty without touch typing (just 6 finger freestyle). I've still some time to go to get over my initial typing speed. A really cool thing about colemak for me is replacing caps lock with backspace, which in itself is getting rid of so much finger/hand-travel, but that can obviously also easily be hacked into qwerty as well.
To this point, I don't know if I would recommend switching to anyone for the following reasons:
- You will slowly use muscle memory of normal qwerty, which can become quite awkward whenever you forced to use another computer. It's not like you cannot type it anymore, but you will be quite slow and inaccurate when typing. However, these situation barely exists for me in everyday life.
- Learning the new layout is quite a feat that takes time and daily dedication. I decided early on to use the new layout in my job (frontend dev) which definitely speed up adoption for me but also slowed me down considerably for some days. Even then it will take quite some time to get back to your initial speed.
- Depending on your profession, typing speed may not at all be a bottle neck. This is true for me as a software developer, where you spend the most time thinking about how to solve problem before typing them in small chunks.
- Wrt touch-typing, I weirdly found out for myself that it can actually cause some wrist and hand strain rather than protect from it. To me it feels that by using a lot more muscles to type it also increases chance of wear-and-tear. This is especially true for the pinkies for me, which I never used much for typing before.
Good thing about colemak wrt keyboard shortcuts is that it only changes letters (no symbols, punctuation, etc.) and then as few letters as possible to still achieve the best finger travel. In practice that means that many shortcuts stay the same, e.g. the common ones as CTRL-Z/X/C/A/Q/W etc.
I sort of did the switch as a self-experiment after being intrigued by all the science behind optimized layouts, and also to challenge myself to learn a new skill for the new year. I wanted to learn touch typing after decades of freestyle typing which I increasingly noticed was very error-prone. I figured that learning a new keyboard layout at the same time is a very good opportunity.
Not sure if I will stick to colemak permanently but so far it's still fun to try to gradually improve on it.
Win3.11 to Win95 springs to mind here.
In contrast, going from "good UX" to "better UX" is a whole different endeavor since you'll have to fight against the friction of people having to give up routines and flows that they have been sticking to for a long time. A thing which no amount of thoughtfulness and consideration of a redesign will be able to make up for – that is, initially.
The biggest problem I have with Hooks is readability. IMO, functional components with hooks are harder to reason about since they obfuscate logic in a weird react-specific contract. Class components have a much simpler, contract and syntax. They also felt much more natural since they picked up on familiar concepts of JavaScript, albeit with a couple of drawbacks. I get the advantages of hooks, but in a way, at least to me it seems like they, at substantial cost, solve a problem which I barely ever encountered, even after building react apps for many years.
I can confirm that there is indeed a stigma associated with the name. As a white young male though, being grumpy about such thing would be quite disproportionate. In that sense, it sort of makes me get an idea of what it could be like to be ridiculed for something one has no control or responsibility about.
So I guess that developers familiarity with the language is what makes it so popular (as in often-used) and is also why we suddenly start using it for arbitrary scripting and mobile app development. The obligatory use of JavaScript in web development led to a whole range of developers growing accustomed to it and now, in spite of its limitations, trying to transfer their ideas to other fields of development.
React Native is just a neat way for JavaScript (React) developers to be able to script UIs for mobile OS's without changing their toolset. And I think for that it's perfectly fine. Obviously if you've never been big into JavaScript I can totally see how cannot make much sense of it all and yeah a lot of the things pointed out are perfectly legitimate. Yet I still think the question whether it makes the language unusable for one scenario or the other is very very opinionated.