swalladge

> I prefer Github's method of "git commit messages don't matter, pull requests do".

This is a bad idea unless it works well for your specific company workflows and you don't care about the future possibility of changing platforms.

Git repos are designed to be self contained, decentralised, and offline-first. If you only care about how things look on github, then the repo will have poor usability outside of github - ie. on your workstation, in your local git tools, on a repo mirror, etc.

Git commits can be a powerful tool for understanding code if the messages are useful. They are immediately accessible through local tools and can quickly add context to a block of code without breaking immersion. But that immersion is broken as soon as you hit a commit messages like "Merge pull request #123" or "fix bugs".

Remind was released in 1996. GPL3 was released in 2007. ;)

I would still argue in these cases that the site shouldn't override the built-in keybinds. Maybe a custom search field/button, and maybe a custom keybind. But when I press Ctrl+F, I always want the same type of search to be initiated. Otherwise, there is no consistency, and efficiency suffers.

> Unfortunately this is broken on the "modern" web as many web pages "helpfully" override the "/" key

Argh this kind of thing makes me really cross. So many sites seem to feel the need to reimplement things that are already part of most browsers or even in the spec. It's not just overridng default shortcuts, but custom context/rightclick menus, custom 'links' (where clicking them runs javascript code to window.open, instead of being a real link), custom form fields that advertise 'excellent accessibility', where the fields would have been accessible anyway if they didn't decide to reimplement them, disabling text selection, overriding focus styles because the accessible styles 'look ugly' ... the 'modern' web is pain.

Anyway, this wasn't going to be a rant. My point was going to be that consistency is key. Your comment on '"Ctrl+F" instead as I'm too scared to try "/" now' really resonated with me, because I've thought about this before. I've found that a feature or shortcut is only useful if it's consistent. I can't build muscle memory or be confident using a feature if it only works 90% of the time. Or even 99%.

I've tried tridacyl and other vim-style plugins for browsers several times in the past, but always end up uninstalling them in disappointment, because it's not possible to have a consistent experience. 99% of the time it works perfectly, but then there are the handful of sites or browser specific pages (eg. about: or view-source:) where it doesn't work at all, or doesn't work consistently so one must disable it. Then muscle memory totally breaks; you need to learn two sets of keybindings for the same context, and that introduces a hesitation for every keypress, which kills speed and enjoyment.

I've had a draft for a similar post lying around for a long time too - this would be about the word "just". It's used too often to undervalue work (just a hobby project, just a webapp...) or be misleading about the complexity of things (just set the dns entry, just solve the halting problem).

I've been using abook [1], which is very old software but is fast, simple, stores data in plain text, and can export to vcard when needed.

[1]: https://abook.sourceforge.io/

I agree. I'm still waiting for completion of the wayland support tracking ticket [1] that was opened a decade ago.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

Any love for rcm [1]? I settled on this after trying many dotfiles systems - works for me with just the right feature set. I don't often see it mentioned on dotfiles discussions online though.

[1]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm

Thank you for firejail! I use it to sandbox Zoom, which is one of the few proprietary tools I need to use for work, and it works perfectly.

They actually do have sandboxing which would help. I'm not sure of the full extent though. See:

- https://snapcraft.io/docs/security-sandboxing

- https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html

However, in my (limited) experience, apps that actually do a lot of things have most of the sandbox features disabled anyway (network, disk access, etc.).

Note that AppImage is similar, but contains no sandboxing.

I've taken to running steam and other untrusted software under a separate user account. It's probably not ideal, and it's annoying to switch accounts to use certain software. But at least it may help limit the damage if the software is hacked as everything is contained within the throwaway account.

I'm sure one can do a lot better with selinux/apparmor/firejail, but it would probably take a lot of work to get it set up properly.

Fugitive + rhurbarb is great! I also use https://github.com/shumphrey/fugitive-gitlab.vim which extends :Gbrowse for gitlab repositories.

+1 to tmux, or even screen if you can't get tmux installed.

It also protects against flaky network connections and accidentally closing the local terminal emulator.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1545/ (sorry) ;)

As an Australian, it also baffles me. We withdrew 1 and 2 cent coins from circulation in 1992, and prices are simply rounded to the nearest 5c when paying with cash. Maximum 3c difference per transaction, which averages out in the long run.

"Evil Mode: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs" by Aaron Bieber is an interesting talk on switching from vim to emacs + org-mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc

> What this author has settled on looks very similar to commonly used tiling window manager shortcuts

This is what really intrigued me about the article. Most are about remapping the prefix to something easier to type, or using more intuitive mappings, but removing the prefix altogether is different.

I think I might try it for a while. I'm kind of in two minds - on one hand it shortens common actions from a chorded prefix + a chord to a single chord. On the other hand, it makes it easier to clash with existing keybindings and modifiers (readline default bindings use alt/meta and ctrl, my i3 config uses super, other cli apps use ctrl...). It also means I need 2 sets of muscle memory, because I use tmux in many servers and such where I don't have the opportunity to add custom config.

> I guess the funny thing is, this gives a nice bunch of Tmux shortcuts, unless you're using a tiling WM for your system , in which case this is hopeless

Unless you use a different modifier for the tiling wm actions - eg. I use super + <keys> to namespace i3 bindings, which leaves alt/meta free for readline and others.

> If something I need is added to Rust 2018 or a later edition, I'll be forced to update or backport.

Should add that new editions with breaking changes are only expected to happen rarely (iirc every 3 years), a large difference to 6 weeks.

> Wouldn't everyone be better off if that language was Rust itself, and people who don't want to write that "modern code" ... don't?

Agreed. The author's whole argument of not wanting "having to make these superficial changes again and again" doesn't make sense. There isn't any requirement for all code to follow the latest and greatest idioms. Rust guarantees backwards compatibility, and the author even acknowledges that in the article.

It would be pretty sad if the reason for no new features or syntax in Rust was due to programmers not wanting to feel like their code was no longer idiomatic.

s/latter/former

Yes exactly. I don't recommend nvidia.

> I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side

I recently switched to AMD - that, with a compositor (compton/picom), resulted in a super smooth tear-free experience in X for me.

My experiences with Intel integrated graphics has always poor performance, and bad screen tearing, sometimes screentearing even with compton running.

Agreed. The extra security given by the latter is a huge win for Wayland, but it needs to be possible to give access when required.

Thanks for these comments!

I definitely need to migrate away from NetworkManager; I think you just gave me the motivation to do so. :)

To clarify, it does support nvidia through the open source nouveau drivers. It's only the proprietary drivers that aren't supported.

Resolution: tweaked the font colours to be higher contrast and removed custom absolute font-weights. Please let me know if there are other accessibility issues with the site. :)

Yep I think you've hit it. I've removed the custom font-weight so things should display normally with the user defined browser fonts as expected now.

I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on toning down the color scheme a lot now. I'll post further updates on the issue that you or someone else has raised on github: https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1

The site should work nicely in reader view or through an rss reader which could be a temporary option until I can fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience :/

What's the best programming language? Best text editor? Best car? Best book?

There is no absolute best, otherwise everyone would use that and we'd only have one left to choose from. There may be a best for your specific use case, but to find that you'll need to do your own tailored research to decide.

HA well there you go. This shouldn't have to exist.

This. I like many of the things that Nim is doing, but I refuse to take it seriously if it's going to make basic things like tag search and grepping difficult.

inb4 a Nim linter is written to force a consistent naming style throughout a codebase.