Blog
FeedHere is the place I ramble. Always about technology but scarcely the same topic from one post to another.
I mostly write about programming and associated tools. Whether it’s about personal or professional challenges, I try to describe the issue, list possible solutions and dive into the chose one.
I also share some tutos for my fellow coworkers when the same question comes back to often. Mostly in the French side of the blog though.
Enjoy!
Some thoughts about NVim
First, there’s been this blog post by Dimitri Sabadie aka Phaazon. A very interesting reading. Notably given the fact he’s a plugin author but also the mind behind This Week in Neovim. The guy knows what he talks about. And his take is that
nvimis getting too big, almost bloated already.Then this Reddit post about both Phaazon’s write-up and a previous poll about moving features into
nvim’s core. The author, u/premell states that having too many plugins leads to unstable setups. One plugin could bring breaking changes to its API. And other plugins relying on it could stop working as expected. As far as I understand, he thinks that some wildly used plugins should make their way tonvim’s core to guarantee stability and prosperity to others.I’m not sure it’s the right way of doing things.
I was wrong: 36 is too much
I somewhat very recently posted about How a 36 keys keyboard suits my needs as a developer.
And thanks to a fellow reader @Kaze, the brain behind the Lafayette layout, I was able to reduce even further down without reducing my typing speed. Even better, I was able to do so while getting rid of the tap dance feature.
In this post I’ll show how I did such a thing by following the step-by-step trial and error I went through. And guess what: if 36 is too much, so is 34. Let’s go down right to 32 keys!
36 keys is enough
I like keyboards. A lot. I like them so much that I started building my own. And once built, programming them, making them answer my needs way better than any pre-built keyboard.
Using a tool I built daily was a pleasant experience. Little by little, I got a better grasp of what I really needed and what did not matter after all. Every iteration of the build-program-use cycle led to a better-suited tool. Until I reached my end-game, a keyboard so handy that I stopped building more and stopped updating the firmware: the final iteration.
Of course, this is a myth, practically a running gag in the small community of people making their keyboards. There are always some small improvements, and some finicky issues to address, this journey never really ends. That being said, I’ve been using the same setup for almost two years in a row now. And I feel like sharing why and how, as a software developer, I went from a full 105 keys to a 36 keys split keyboard as my daily driver.