A little place of calm

I'm back! I have been away from the Internet for a week – a self-enforced leave of absence to try to avoid getting RSI. Happily to say, it seems to have worked – just typing as much as i need to at work, and having a rest in the evenings. I love programming and i love my job, so i really don't want to injure myself.

I have been trying out another keyboard layout: Colemak. It has similar aims to Dvorak but, unlike Dvorak, they actually used a computer to help generate the layout! Also, unlike Dvorak, Colemak layout is fairly similar to Qwerty, possibly making it easier for Qwerty users to switch. It keeps Z, X, C and V in the same place, useful for the obvious keyboard shortcuts.

colemak.com – the website for the layout.
Colemak on a TypeMatrix EZ-Reach keyboard – made for my own reference, but i imagine others may come looking for it too. If you want it as a PDF, let me know.

Work has been fun lately – we've been trying out pair programming and i'm really enjoying it. I took a while to believe that it really is beneficial for two people to program together, but i'm coming round to the idea now. Especially when trouble-shooting – there is almost no break in the flow because the combination of two brains focussed on a problem means that we come up with the solution pretty quickly. Plus it's also really good fun! :D I think the key is to have a separate pairing station set up with two keyboards and two mice plugged in. That gives a feeling of equality. With a little perseverance it soon starts to feel very natural to program together.

Social life has been fun too. The Spring weather is making me very happy. Church has been great, really enjoying it. In my week-of-no-internet i became totally hooked on Life On Mars – can't wait to see the second series!

I leave you with something that i saw in a bookshop in Southampton yesterday – made me LOL ;-)

I'm sure Vim is going to be a wonderful thing for me to have learnt – a skill that will stay with me and benefit me for the rest of my life. It's just getting there that's so hard!

I started using Vim in earnest this week. On Monday i used Vim in the morning, and switched to TextMate when i got too frustrated. Tuesday was periodic switching between the two. TextMate when Vim got on my nerves, and back to Vim when i found myself missing Vim features. Yesterday and today i have been entirely on Vim.

Yesterday was great – i really felt i was getting somewhere, and gaining speed. It started to be less about me getting around Vim, and more about me doing my work. Today has been a bit more frustrating, as i know it is slowing me down significantly in the short-term, but i'm sure it will be worth it!

I keep finding myself smiling at Vim when i have elegantly told it to do something quite complex. It's like "Wow, Vim, you're so clever!" Selecting a block of text and duplicating it, going five words in and changing the text to the end of the quote marks: vapyP5wct" – said as "visual a paragraph, yank, Paste above, 5 words, change till quote marks.

It's so cool to have Git integration right within Vim, and now that i've got the hang of the NERD Tree, and manipulating windows and buffers, i'm coming along a treat! I've discovered i have quite a strong perception of the layout of a project – without a project drawer i just couldn't think what to do or where to find anything! I've also decided i really like side-by-side windows so that i can see code and spec at the same time. I'll do a screenshot when i'm on my big computer.

The biggest problem in fact is not the super-amazing-cleverness of Vim and its plugins. I'm getting the hang of them pretty fast. The hardest thing is just learning the basic commands – like – moving around! I still get j and k mixed up, and it requires so much brain energy to remember whether i want to type a or i, o or capital O … even to remember to press <Esc> to come out of insert mode. Invariably i get it wrong and have to undo all the time. Either that or i'm undoing when i don't want to, because i think u is for up. Fortuately i discovered on a Dvorak keyboard, k is underneath u so that sort of reminds me that k is up.

I just hope it is not my dyslexia making it hard to learn the basic movements. Most of Vim makes a lot of sense to me. I like that it uses mnemonics and mostly pressing one key at a time. I love how you can combine keystrokes in sequences to achieve really powerful effects. I hear that when you get really good at Vim you're not even aware of exactly which keys you're pressing. You just think about what you want to do, and your fingers do it automatically. I'm sure i can get to that level of proficiency … it's just a case of being patient with myself whilst i'm still learning.

It was like this when i was learning Dvorak, but i'm glad i did, and my fingers do just type without my having to think about where the letters are. I type at around 80 words per minute, which is pretty nice, so i'm sure with the power of Vim, i could be truly awesome!

A couple of times recently i've found myself doing <ESC>:wq in the internet instead of pressing the submit button. I don't use Vim very much at the moment – really only to make Git commits – but i've had enough of a taste that i feel it's something i want to learn properly.

For a few months i've been searching for a text editor that i can use both on the Mac at work, and Linux on my netbook and PC at home. TextMate is a wonderful thing, but there is no decent Linux equivalent. A colleague and i started writing OpenMate – an open source cross platform equivalent to TextMate … but it's hard! I enjoy gedit but failed to get gedit installed at work. I've tried NetBeans and jEdit but didn't like them much, and they feel too big and clunky for a netbook.

After a little bit of reading about Vim i have become very excited. More excited that i've ever felt about a text editor before! I've realised that my conception of Vim has been wrong. I used to press i straight away to get into Insert mode, and stay there until i wanted to perform a command, in which case i'd press <ESC> followed by the command. Now i realise that a better way to use it is to be in 'Normal' mode most of the time, press i to enter Insert mode very briefly, and press <ESC> as soon as i've finished inserting.

This afternoon i discovered vimtutor and have been really enjoying it! You can run it on any Unix/Linux based system; just type vimtutor at the command line. It takes you through every command, at your own pace. It gives you samples of text to correct, using the commands you have just learnt. It's actually quite fun and demonstrates the power of Vim very effectively!

At the moment i'm still muttering everything as i go, like "delete … 3 … words" as i very slowly type d3w and i'm exclaiming in delight at almost everything i learn – like – "Wow! That's so clever!" I'm sure soon enough i'll be able to use it effectively without making a lot of noise about it!

It is interesting learning it for Dvorak, but not too difficult. The up and down keys are in my left hand, and the left and right keys are in my right hand. They all actually fit rather neatly under my hands and feel intuitive even though they are not all in a line together. To be honest, i think i probably prefer it to the way it works under Qwerty.

Here is a helpful Vim cheatsheet laid out for Dvorak. Thanks, Mark Schoonover!
Here is an excellent article about the wonders of Vi/Vim.

It's ridiculous how exciting this feels to me! Perhaps it's the sense of moving up another level in the geek hierarchy! :D

You know what – church was alright! :) The music was good, the people were friendly-but-not-too-pushy. Most of them seem to be from South Africa, heh! :) I might talk a little more about the church experience later … but for now …

My 'reward' for going to church, hahaha!

I love it!! I am sitting in the living room right now, connected to the wireless network, surfing the internet. It's easy to type on, especially now i switched the keyboard layout to Dvorak. I'm glad i thought to buy a little mouse because i don't get on too well with trackpads. I have enabled the XFCE advanced settings, downloaded Firefox 3, installed the Gimp … all is very, very good! :)

It is so cool how i can just take the SD card out of the camera, slot it into the Acer and it reads the pictures straight away, no fuss. Delightful! :)

It has a web cam, which may mean i can do Skype video calls. That would be cool! As a machine it works very nicely, makes a very faint hum, the screen is bright and clear, and the keyboard is perfectly responsive. The Linpus Linux it comes with is perfectly useable. I might be tempted to switch to Ubuntu, but i know this is designed to be fast and energy efficient, so i think i'll stick with it for now. I managed to get rid of the XP-imitation title bar buttons, so i'm happy! :)

Esperanto and Second Life – a match made in heaven! In Second Life you have a lovely mixture of people from all around the world who want to speak Esperanto and are happy to teach other people. Plus you have this real-time conversation style which, combined with the easy grammatical rules of Esperanto, helps newbies to pick up a bit of the language very quickly.

I have discovered how to modify my Dvorak keyboard layout to include the extended Esperanto keys. On Linux, all you have to do is find your current keyboard layout (for me it is in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/gb) and add or replace the following lines:

key <AD07> { [ g, G, gcircumflex, Gcircumflex ] };
key <AD08> { [ c, C, ccircumflex, Ccircumflex ] };
key <AC04> { [ u, U, ubreve, Ubreve ] };
key <AC07> { [ h, H, hcircumflex, Hcircumflex ] };
key <AC10> { [ s, S, scircumflex, Scircumflex ] };
key <AB03> { [ j, J, jcircumflex, Jcircumflex ] };

For me, i simply had to add the lines because the gb(dvorak) layout extends the us(dvorak) layout. This allows you to hold down AltGr with the letter to type the modified version. Shift-AltGr also works.

Nun mi povas tajpi ĝusta en Esperanto! :)