there's something about going mouseless that feels super satisfying, you become limited only by the speed of your thought (/uj). good keybindings help a lot with that, once you've got the muscle memory down using your computer feels a bit like playing tetris.
ever since I moved to vim at the start of this year I've been tuning my keybindings for navigation a lot more, seeing what works & what didn't, going back and refining... it's taken a fair while to get to the comfortable place I'm at now
my brain isn't big enough to hold too many combos, so grouping & simplicity was
a must, in order for them to stick there has to be patterns to them rather than
arbitrary hyper+cmd+shift+alt+y :dothing, for e.g.
- switching virtual desktops
cmd+<,cmd+>(left, right) - switching application tabs:
alt+<,alt+> - moving virtual desktops:
cmd+shift+<,cmd+shift+> - moving application tabs:
alt+shift+<,alt+shift+>
I try and use cmd for system level bindings; copy, pasting, moving between
desktops - then for actually doing things inside applications themselves I use
alt, having the of "I want to move across", then narrowed by
application/system via alt/cmd helps a lot in actually remembering the
bindings
some more:
- closing windows:
cmd+w - closing application tabs:
alt+w - go to window n (1-9)
cmd+n - go to tab n (1-9)
alt+n - move between windows
cmd+hjkl - move between vim split:
alt+hjkl - resize window
cmd+shift+hjkl - resize vim split:
alt+shift+hjkl
etc.
tiling wms vs tmux
i used to use tabs in kitty for quick switching between my editor and terminals running server processes, but thinking about it i was just using tabs as a proxy for windows -- a convenient holding place for something frequently accessed -- having keybinds for kitty tabs & vim tabs was a pain in the ass; i sacked that off and switching to just using virtual desktops and tiling
hhkb
haven't made life any easier for myself by getting a hhkb, but the topre
switches are so worth it. i've got a couple of system-level maps that help out
(using Karabiner-Elements), namely
mapping hjkl to arrows, and a big one: long pressing keys to change their
behaviour
take escape for example, that's waaaay over in the top-right, but then on a
normal keyboard you have caps lock, this big fat key that's never pressed to
the right, so a lot of people rebind that to escape.
on an hhkb ctrl is where caps lock is, so I'd lose that, fortunately since
escape is only ever used for changing modes it's only ever pressed for a few
hundred millisecons, ctrl however is used only for combos and so pressed for a
bit longer than that
we can use this to have the following:
- short press
caps locktoescape - long press
caps locktocontrol
long/short pressing opens up a whole new world, totally blew my fuckign socks off, i've yet to explore much beyond escape/ctrl but probably some other cool stuff you can do with this
ctrl+s & ctrl+a to volume up/down is a good one too, much more convenient
than remembering some Fn key
quake style spotify
"quake-style terminals" for things other than terminals is also super useful,
having spotify pop-up on cmd+shift+s and switching track/pausing saves me so
much time every day, done via a little python & yabai:
this post is probably super autism, but whatever, dots here if you care