Small stupid things that make up my dev environment

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/21/env/

by blfr • 8 years ago

92 48 8 years ago

I am 5'6 and I have found I like a desk about 24-26" off the ground so I can sit with my feet flat on the floor and hands in my lap at the keyboard without shoulders hunched. Hard to find!

I have my old Aeron which I don't really love vertical adjustment nearly as low as it can go.

denimnerd422• 8 years ago

sounds like you need a 3M keyboard tray..

I do like my standing desk more though even though its 3x the cost of a good keyboard tray. It's has more flexibility as it can go down to 24" and up to 50" More importantly it's useful for more than just typing.. writing, soldering, etc.

snowwindwaves3• 8 years ago

Any links for the standing desk? 3m keyboard tray looks perfect. I had a great keyboard tray at Nortel in the nineties and all my workstations have been sub par since then.

cimmanom3• 8 years ago

I have the exact same issue. A sit-stand desk with a wide height range has saved my back. The biggest challenge left is finding a chair that’s shallow enough to sit at the back of (for proper lumbar support) and still be able to bend your knees.

Try adding a nice extra-tall laptop riser too. Typical ones tend to be 6-12” too low once the desk is no longer too high for typing.

wahnfrieden• 8 years ago

Have a riser to recommend?

dws• 8 years ago

Will your feet know the difference if it isn't really the floor they're flat on?

snowwindwaves3• 8 years ago

Yes because I like to move my legs around a bit to the sides too and those little foot stools are too small.

Or I roll away from the keyboard to use pen and paper and then have to move The foot rest.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

I have found I like a desk about 24-26" off the ground so I can sit with my feet flat on the floor and hands in my lap at the keyboard without shoulders hunched

My company has an ergonomics consultant who comes to each desk once a year and observes posture, foot position, etc... then recommends changes in desks and seating for each person. It’s the first place I’ve worked that does this. Someone said it was somehow tied in with our health insurance company.

jniedrauer• 8 years ago

The idea of programming in green text on a black background with no syntax highlighting makes me shudder.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

I did it back in the olden days, on everything from Wyse and Wang terminals to a Commodore 64 and an IBM XT with MDA display.

I haven’t done it that way in years, but this article makes me want to try it again. I wonder if all that highlighting is actually making me less focused. I guess I’ll find out later this week.

XorNot• 8 years ago

I can't see how you can get more productive by removing a channel of information from yourself though.

zaro• 8 years ago

I think it's something similar to the Stockholm sindrome. It's literally hurting your eyes but you are so used to the pain you don't want to let it go :)

Joke aside, I remember when Green was the only colour my monitor could produce. And it felt great only because the other option was not using a computer at all.

marssaxman• 8 years ago

Works just as well now as it did back when it was the only choice. I like the simplicity; it can be less distracting.

julianlam• 8 years ago

It's these small, stupid things that actually were the reason why I couldn't hack it on a Macbook.

You just get stuck in your ways when everything is set up _just right_, and the little things that Macs do that Linux didn't, and vice versa, just drove me up the wall, even though it was small and stupid.

AlexCoventry• 8 years ago

I've had success with this situation in the past by working in a vm or docker container.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

I think I understand what you’re saying.

I’m a big trackpad guy. The only one in my office. I love my gestures on macOS, and use all kinds of them to do my work.

Recently yet another computer was added to my desk by IT for a new project. This one is an HP laptop with Ubuntu.

I’m sure Ubuntu is a great thing and I’ll love it when I get used to it. But the HP’s keyboard and trackpad are terrible, and using the machine completely disrupts my usual workflow. I miss my gestures. I miss being able to define actions way out to F19. I miss knowing that a swipe will always be a swipe, and not a scroll.

We get set in our ways, especially when those ways are very productive and make sense to us. Having to switch to a different set of muscle memories is problematic.

pdkl95• 8 years ago

when everything is set up _just right_

That's why I'm still using Enlightenment DR16 as my window manager, with the same theme/config I've been slowly customizing for ~20 years. Every time I try a different windows manager (including any enlightenment >= E17) it feels like an incomplete toy, not the feature-rich tool I'm familiar with.

zepearl• 8 years ago

I did try to switch from e16 to e17 multiple times (on Gentoo), but I always had to rollback; I never found a bugfree version of e17.

(sometimes in 2018 I had to switch away from e16 (got taken out from Gentoo's main package repo) and I ended up using XFCE. It's a pity that e17 never really worked, at least for me => I wonder if they'll ever publish a really stable version)

cimmanom3• 8 years ago

Yup. It’s the reason I’ll never buy a laptop with that stupid touchbar.

rcarmo2• 8 years ago

I’ve actually become so used to the Mac over the years that I prefer it. I like having a clear separation between Ctrl and Cmd, and the only thing I install for a different “feel” is Moom (for tiling windows with the same hotkeys I use on Linux or Windows).

But, again, I’m a vim+tmux guy, so the only real annoyance is the lack of a real Esc key.

wumms• 8 years ago

I'm using Capslock as (additional) Esc key.

arvinsim2• 8 years ago

I was able to get by with white on black terminal before.

But nowadays, I can't stand coding if the editor doesn't have syntax highlighting.

juangacovas• 8 years ago

Same with being able to put the cursor over a variable name and automatically highlight all of them used in the same scope. Can't live without that

ggm• 8 years ago

Desks without modesty panels are a feature of offices without due consideration for personal privacy.

thibran2• 8 years ago

For the typematic delay, I have no clue why it is so slow on Linux by default. Probably somebody has set those values 30 years ago and then nobody cared to update them. I use 'xset r rate 200 40' and when I use another Linux computer, typing feels just broken, super slow (Windows has better defaults than Linux in this regard). The weird part, there is no reason why keystrokes should have such a huge delay. Changing the xset values improves the user experience in a quite dramatic way.

kungtotte• 8 years ago

Could it be related to the teletype origins of Linux terminals? If you're on a slow line, you'll notice the difference more if your repeat rate is higher.

blfr2• 8 years ago

Maybe but nowadays you can use mosh[1] and it's not an issue any more.

[1] https://mosh.org/

blfr2• 8 years ago

This seems great. How did I not know this. Trying it out right away.

EDIT: I adjusted it a little to have fewer repetitions per second but lowering the delay is amazing. What a great thing to find in your HN stocking. Merry Christmas!

tasuki4• 8 years ago

Where do you put this magical "xset r rate 200 40" on a modern Linux desktop?

~/.bashrc is the wrong place for sure (I might not even be running X!)

~/.Xresources seems like it would be the right place but it's a command so that won't work...

thibran2• 8 years ago

I have it in my i3 config: exec --no-startup-id sleep 2 && /usr/bin/xset r rate 200 40

mr_toad• 8 years ago

Anyone not coding on a 4K or higher monitor should complain.

They’re not that expensive now, and the text is so much sharper. You might not notice the difference with a 4k TV on the other side of a room, but you will with a 28 inch screen a couple of feet in front of you.

arvinsim2• 8 years ago

I don't like native 4k. Text rendering is too small for me.

If I have to go native, 1440p or QHD ultrawides would be the best.

But 4k scaled down in MacOS is great too!

kdmytro2• 8 years ago

You have to set DPI that is appropriate for your screen size. If you keep using the default 90 DPI with a 15" 4K screen, the text will for sure be small because it is rendered as if the screen is about 49".

slededit• 8 years ago

The intent is to use the extra resolution for detail not to fit more on the screen. Unfortunately most software is still designed for back when we didn't have enough real-estate and so Linux is not very good at DPI scaling. Windows used to be just as bad but has gotten better slowly over time.

Mac has always handled this perfectly from the get-go.

tetha• 8 years ago

My own small thing is my personal keyboard. I have both a mechanical and non-mechanical personal keyboard, mind you. They cost me a pretty penny ($100+ for each), and I wouldn't expect an employer to spend that easily. So I can just provide my own.

I have really long arms overall and normal keyboards force me to both put my wrists at really weird angles and turn and twist my elbows to get my hands to fit there. Something like the Microsoft Natural was a decent-ish width, but the Kinesis advantage or the Ergodox are just amazing. It's funny to watch too - people are kinda scared to touch a Kinesis advantage "because it's split and weird", but they start touch-typing quickly and start arranging the keyboard parts as it is comfortable in small steps as well. You just nudge the keyboard part instinctively with your thumb or your pinky to make it more comfortable.

rcarmo2• 8 years ago

When setting up a Linux VM to work from, I usually go with OpenBox, LXterminal and FBPanel and call it a day:

https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-templates/tree/master/deskt...

Building a portable setup is a lot easier these days with Docker, but over the years I started paring down stuff to vim+tmux (which work fine inside WSL) and sharing my dotfiles across the Mac, Linux and Windows.

The one thing that gets me every time, though, is having a working SSH keychain. I want to log in once and have ssh-agent just work, and it seems like every year I have to re-learn another way to do it (which is fine, but annoying).

Small stupid things that make up my dev environment

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