More Hands

So the experiment failed. Sort of. Last time I talked about changing to vim in an effort to save my hands. Text entry of course ended up the same and I could keep hitting my (paltry) word counts. But when editing, well, there are too many commands to hold in my head, and most of my editing time was spent consulting the cheat sheet on my desk. Editing became wading through sticky molasses. Had I stuck with it perhaps this need would lessen over time. Also, I kept falling back on using the mouse which is very much frowned on in vim circles. BUT it turns out my hands require the relief that comes with stopping and moving to the electric rodent.

It was not all wasted effort though. The separation of writing and editing into distinct contexts is something I plan to continue in future. And learning Regular Expressions will be invaluable when doing a complicated search and replace task.

Other parts of last month’s change-up have been more successful:

• unsucky keys, the no-chording script I wrote is still in everyday use. There are bugs and edge-cases, but it works well and stable enough to stay out of the way
• Changing keyboards was the main positive this past month. The one I found in the drawer was a non-starter. Literally. The keys didn’t work. So, I purchased a Raspberry Pi keyboard and it’s become my daily driver. It’s sturdy for the price, has a USB hub, and the money goes to support the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I had to remap a couple keys to make my hands happy, but it has made a genuinely big difference to comfort and pains levels.

Current Status

Cat: Reclining

Writing: Optimistic

Hands: Cautious