I really love my vasectomy. You’ll kick yourself you didn’t do it sooner. (No sooner than your last child, I hope.)

Reminds me of the ancient technology where you just kick it until you get a more tractable problem.

I love my vasectomy more than my dad loved me. ;-)

I hope you taught them how to pirate. ;-) Seriously though, my 20-something associates have absolutely no idea how to, they think it’s some kind of dark art rather than clicking on a link.

fascinating take on touch typing from someone who doesn’t practice, understand, or respect it

I feel your pain and irrelevancy with crystalline clarity. The world isn’t interested in doing things the right way, or even in a good way; consumers are too perversely enthralled by capital’s interests. I kind of hate that computers ever became a consumer good.

Takes thousands of hours just to git gud! I play for the sense of fluency and control that only comes with extending your sense of body and self into the game world. I play strategy games to relax, but I play my mains to channel the torrents of energy swirling around in my head.

E and F is certainly is a problem, but developing your own custom key map is almost always part of a larger process of becoming more effective anyway. Typically I start by just moving all left-hand bindings right by one key.

I feel like the mouse is a good generalist, jack of all trades input device, but outside of fps, I feel that any task that quote requires unquote a mouse is done better with a tablet. They are of equivalent price, honestly. Mice are not cheap, tablets are not expensive.

Right now I am using voice dictation because it is better than typing on a phone, but oh my God it sucks so bad.

Pfff, minutes after trying to minimize your nerdiness, you post this confession.

The things we have to go through just to meet basic needs.

How are you redirecting all input through your custom exec? Is that an i3 feature?

I feel that.

Looks like it’s a finger ball, rather than the thumb ball Logitech usually favours? Middle finger on LMB, ring finger on RMB? Ohhh, THUMB on LMB.

I always rebind to ESDF if the game doesn’t do stupid things preventing it from being practical. The addition of the 1QAZ strip being available to the pinky is a killer feature all on its own. I typically use that for weapon switching, instead of having to stretch up to 1234 and take my fingers off the movement keys.

Tablets are better than mice at drawing, modelling, and photo editing. Mice are good for first person shooters. Game controllers are better for most other games. You can mouse in dired-mode i guess, if you’re a casual.

Yes, it is taught. If you take a typing course, you will be taught to use home row. What you mean is, you were never taught to type because we don’t teach that in school anymore. If you do most your typing on a touch screen, I have to imagine: you are so young. In 20 years when no one is using a touch screen to enter text anymore (but likely still use physical keyboards), you will remember this conversation, and have some greater insight.

Whether or not you know how to touch type, in any situation where there is a mouse, THERE IS A PHYSICAL KEYBOARD. Not knowing how to touch type just makes the task switching overhead greater.

I have a game controller and a mouse. I don’t use my game controller to code. I don’t use my keyboard to sculpt. The problem isn’t that mice exist at all, its that they are overwhelmingly dominant to the point where most applications do not cater to anything else.

Sure. It’s a lowest common denominator interface. With all that comes with that.

It’s also an age thing. My visual processing is getting worse and worse. My disorientation facing a busy screen with literally thousands of objects that can be interacted with by mouse is a cognitive drain compared to a textual interface where I do most of the work abstractly without having to use visual processing at all. Like reading a book vs watching a movie.

I probably have a lot more experience using pre-mouse era computers than most people. It’s like being asked to start using a different language when you are 20. Yeah, you’ll become perfectly fluent for a couple decades… but you’ll also lose that language first when you get old.

I have noticed that millenials navigate multilayer mouse interfaces (like going down a few chained drop down menus) way faster than I ever did. And zoomers use touch screen keyboards almost as well as I ever touchtyped. Brains are only plastic to a degree, and it just plain feels good to use all those neurons that you first laid down when you were young and your mind was infinite.

I have no idea what you mean by “fell out of favour”. Does your keyboard not have pips on F and J? People still touch type. Dunno what to tell you.

You’re getting hung up on “home row”. You still have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. It’s the same problem, whether or not you know how to type well and stare at your hands, except now you have to add steps for “look at the screen” and “look back at your hands”.

I used the logitech optical trackball mouse for quite a few years! Did not play a lot of FPS a that time…

why have I made that anonymous function interactive??

Edit: Oh I think anything you bind to a key has to be interactive.