ratrocket (u/ratrocket)

ratrocket commented on Twelve Days of Shell 12days.cmdchallenge.com... · Posted by u/zoidb

arionmiles · 11 days ago

I've recently reached a point where I feel I've reached an upper limit with how much efficiency I can extract from my usual toolset/editors. So I've gone on a journey where I'm finally exploring tools that make living in the command line a productive and pleasant experience for me.

I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers.

It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard.

I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well).

Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard.

My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.

ratrocket · 11 days ago

Not commenting on the larger gist of the comment, only:

> I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions

If you can, try using a left-hand vertical mouse. I use an Evoluent but there are a million brands. Get a cheapo and try it out. I figure it took me about a week to adjust and my wrists have been happier ever since.

ratrocket commented on Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit notebookcheck.net/Framewo... · Posted by u/woodrowbarlow

dontlaugh · 14 days ago

That is interesting.

I wish someone made a keyboard that doesn’t suck, ideally split as well.

ratrocket · 14 days ago

Similar to a sibling comment, and perhaps not really applicable (since this isn't a company making something people can buy...), but the MNT Reform is amenable to fitting a custom/ergonomic keyboard also (I hadn't seen the Framework in the sibling comment, it looks very cool!).

I don't know how to link to it directly, but midway down this article there's a picture and some more links of an MNT Reform (apparently completely home-built) with a very cool, "thumb-centric", column staggered ergo keyboard:

https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-07-01-july-update.htm...

(search for "More great mods from the community..." heading if interested)

I would very much like to have a keyboard like either of those on my laptop. The stares you'd get when in public!!

ratrocket commented on Ly – A lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD codeberg.org/fairyglade/l... · Posted by u/modinfo

hecanjog · 18 days ago

Never bothered to set one up either! I type `startx` and get dumped into dwm. (Udiskie is a nice addition for automounting drives too.)

ratrocket · 18 days ago

I also type "startx". Never saw the point of a display manager (which might be my own shortcoming!).

ratrocket commented on Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad wssite.vercel.app/blog/mo... · Posted by u/weirdsmiley

zenethian · a month ago

> When I was still using Manjaro Linux back in 2019, I got a nudge to try i3wm. It was my first experience with any window manager

Is the author saying that until 2019 they used Linux on the desktop without using X?

ratrocket · 25 days ago

I read it to mean the author used "desktop environments" prior to that, so KDE or Gnome, as opposed to a "bare" window manager.

ratrocket commented on Making a micro Linux distro (2023) popovicu.com/posts/making... · Posted by u/turrini

c0balt · 2 months ago

Running as a cloud image can be relatively easy, you only need the default drivers from the kernel and need to get your image installed.

The latter can be done by booting into another distro and kexec'ing into your own kernel and performing the Installation afterward from memory. See also nixos-anywhere for a practical implementation of this

ratrocket · 2 months ago

On digital ocean (at least) you can upload your own images and boot droplets directly from them.

In the past I've used a script called "alpine-make-vm-image" to run alpine images in digital ocean.

https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image

(Maybe that script does some magic to make booting a droplet directly from the image possible. On that I plead ignorance :)

ratrocket commented on Scripts I wrote that I use all the time evanhahn.com/scripts-i-wr... · Posted by u/speckx

GNOMES · 2 months ago

I use my "dc" command to reverse "cd" frequently https://gist.github.com/GNOMES/6bf65926648e260d8023aebb9ede9...

Ex:

    > echo $PWD
    /foo/bar/batz/abc/123

    > dc bar && echo $PWD
    /foo/bar

Useful for times when I don't want to type a long train of dot slashes(ex. cd ../../..).

Also useful when using Zoxide, and I tab complete into a directory tree path where parent directories are not in Zoxide history.

Added tab complete for speed.

ratrocket · 2 months ago

Has "dc" the calculator fallen this far out of favor?! :)

> dc is the oldest surviving Unix language program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_%28computer_program%29

I used "dc" (the calculator) just earlier this week. Kids these days? :)

ratrocket commented on I see a future in jj steveklabnik.com/writing/... · Posted by u/steveklabnik

jtwaleson · 2 months ago

If a product is 10x better than what's currently available, it will see rapid adoption. There was obviously something about git that made it MUCH better than the precursors and that's why it obliterated everything else.

I highly doubt that new tools will be 10x better than git. Maybe 20%?

ratrocket · 2 months ago

One way I compare the git to jj transition (if it happens, or for whom it happens) to the svn to git transition is: branching in svn was awful. It was heavyweight and you were signing up for pain later down the road. Git made branching easy and normal, almost something you barely need to think about. jj does a similar thing for rebasing. For someone whose familiarity with git is clone, pull, push, merge, creating branches (so, basic/working/practical familiarity but even "rebase -i" might be pushing the limits)- for someone like that what jj offers is a similar "lift" of a feature (rebase) from "scary" to "normal" similar to what git did for branching compared to svn.

That's just one aspect of the whole thing, and of course if you're a git rebase wizard (or have tools that make you that) then this won't seem relevant. But I think for a lot of people this might be a salient point.

ratrocket commented on Notes on switching to Helix from Vim jvns.ca/blog/2025/10/10/n... · Posted by u/chmaynard

wycy · 2 months ago

How is no syntax highlighting better, specifically?

ratrocket · 2 months ago

(To address sibling comment: If I were colorblind, I would lead with that in any conversation about syntax highlighting; I am not colorblind.)

To answer the question: it's a feeling, like lots of things in software development. I tried "no syntax highlighting", found that I liked it, and I no longer use syntax highlighting. To say "specifically" how it's "better"... I'm not even saying it's better. "I like no-syntax-highlighting" is the statement I'm making (which, when it comes to syntax highlighting, is a statement a lot of people have issues with). So, from my personal experience, I take issue with the statement that no-syntax-highlighting is making things "difficult for the sake of it".

Try this out for analogy: I ate Red Baron pizzas every Friday night for 15 years, then I heard about homemade pizza 10 years ago. I tried making homemade pizza. It was good! ("I tried it and liked it") Now I only eat homemade pizza on Fridays. How is homemade pizza specifically better? It's better because I like it more. That's all there is to it. It's a preference.

(For the analogy to work, you have to like or at some point have liked Red Baron frozen pizzas. I happen to like them... the analogy is flawed though, I admit!)

(Let me preempt criticism that I'm comparing Red Baron frozen pizzas to syntax highlighting. I am not. It's only about the preference, not the object of the preference.)

ratrocket commented on Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files chezsoi.org/lucas/blog/sp... · Posted by u/Lucas-C

voidmain0001 · 2 months ago

How do you use qpdf for extraction when its README states “qpdf does not render PDFs or perform text extraction, and it does not contain higher-level interfaces for working with page contents.”

ratrocket · 2 months ago

Not the person you're replying to, but when they said "extraction" I believe they're talking about extracting pages from a PDF (like "splitting" the PDF apart, page-wise), not text. At least that's a thing I've used qpdf for in the past.