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OwenEverbinde

OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.one
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I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don’t know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it’s Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

I know why: <Ctrl> and <Alt> are further from the home row than <Shift>. <Shift> is millimeters from the pinkie finger on either side. Your pinkie can reach that thing while the other three fingers stay put. <CapsLock> is in a similarly easy position, (and, in fact, another bit of Emacs advice I ran across is “switch <CapsLock> with <Ctrl>”, which feels like it wouldn’t be “often recommended” for Emacs users if default Emacs was conducive to the standard qwerty keyboard layout.)

The bottom row of the keyboard is just too far from the home row. <Right Alt> strains my right hand so much that I rarely reach for it instinctively, and using my left? Gotta say, whoever chose (zap-to-char) and (scroll-down-command) as the punishments upon any failed attempt at reaching M-x really knew how to intimidate the newcomers and the slow-learners (like me) to these heavy-duty text editors.

The same story goes for <Ctrl>. The Odyssey that stands between my right pinkie and <Right Ctrl> is so easily blown off-course that said pinkie never volunteers to embark when I think “<Ctrl>” for fear it will never see its wife Penelope again… which means I end up typing C-x (and all that follows) entirely with my left hand… which stretches my left hand off the home row and trashes my accuracy.

But I feel like I should note at this point: I have large hands and unusually broad shoulders, and if one of my hands is resting on the home row in a comfortable position (75-80 degrees), the other one is reaching the home row at a stark diagonal (50-60 degrees). Maybe I’m the unusual one. Maybe I’m a rare kind of person who needs to be using a rare keyboard to accommodate my stature. And maybe everyone else can use Emacs just fine (… though, again, I note: there are a few too many ergonomic hacks for Emacs available online for that to be the case).

Main point: for me – and apparently a decent number of forum users giving each other Emacs advice online – the bottom-row modifiers are hard to hit. And it should come as no surprise, considering how far those keys are from the home row.

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I’m finding some details in this stackoverflow question

According to the question’s first comment,

Those default arguments get filled in when you’re invoked with pkgs.callPackage, but nix-build doesn’t do that. –

Charles Duffy Dec 2, 2022 at 16:05

Then one of the answers says:

This worked for me:

nix-build -E ‘with import {}; callPackage ./default.nix {}’

Definitely try this more complicated nix-build command.

I don’t currently have a NixOS system myself, though, so I’m not really able to test it out. I switched back to Debian because it’s more user friendly and I’m not quite ready for NixOS.

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I, on the other hand, will start a sentence, – something like, “but regardless, what really gets overlooked is…” – and realize that from word 1, I didn’t even have the concept of a point.

I realize, in that moment, that I was ENTIRELY reciting tokens.

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Oh, you’re coming from Ubuntu! That’s a much more manageable transition.

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I’d build as many zero-equity housing co-ops as I could in areas with high costs of living.

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Yeah, going directly from Windows to NixOS is a harsh transition.

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I did not know those existed. But I’m not surprised Emacs users would be seeking them out.

Nor am I surprised that an entire writeup on Emacs-triggered hand strain is one of the hyperlinks on the article you linked.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RepeatedStrainInjury

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Wow. That’s Linus Torvalds levels of screaming, “ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!”

People got really worked up back in 2008.

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The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.

I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, “women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration.”

Hell, “hysteria” was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.

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