Number one essential thing to do when using emacs is set caps lock to be your control key. This is the layout that emacs was designed for. Emacs is still harder on your joints than vim though. I’ve struggled with RSI but switching to a dvorak layout with some slight key remapping has worked for me. Emacs works well this way.
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A nice chrome extension for (downloading porn)
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not related but i’ve been typing dvorak since highschool and still no RSI from typing. ofc im not a programmer but if one learns it one might find it a lot more comfortable for the fingers. i don’t have a good point of comparison
also everyone knows this already but notepad++ is so good. just merely the autosaving feature makes it so so handy, im constantly just typing stuff and closing the app, reopen and wow all my stuff is still there. currently i have 8-9 completely unsaved text files that just live in notepad++. for this purpose it is probably better than any digital sticky note app ive used
it kind of feels like what a revelation it was when browsers started doing the whole “reopen tabs on startup” deal
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oh yeah update on this: MPV is great, I love the GUI, it’s lightweight, it opens all the movie files I want, so basically im a convert
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this is specific but if folks are interested in software / apps for practicing music i have some thoughts i could write out
Personally I require not only this, but I also want it to be autosaved to the cloud so I seamlessly switch devices whenever I want (e.g. take a break on editing a doc, and go lie down on the couch and keep editing the file on my phone).
Like I mentioned earlier, what I find works better than a dedicated app is to put all my notes in gmail drafts which I never send. It’s less absurd than it sounds. It gives me the property above, it reduces time wasted on menus and file management to a bare minimum (I don’t even need to choose a filename) and it also means I can use the gmail search box to indiscrimately keyword search in both emails and notes.
I tried “proper” methods like cloud-synced Obsidian too but I don’t see how it’s supposed to be better.
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yeah i mean i do the Gmail drafts thing, but what is even better than that is Google Keep sidebar for Gmail. just click the little yellow and white lightbulb icon on the left side
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Oh wow, yeah, this thing’s way better than VLC Media Player: faster, more configurable, way more stable, and frame back is a life-saver. Instant switch. : D
fyi, some context around mpv/VLC (I’ve been using mpv and the macOS frontend, IINA, myself, for at least 7 years at this point, and VLC for more like 20):
mpv is a (relatively) new fork of mplayer, which was the longstanding Linux media-player app. it was historically launched from the command line and didn’t even have a “GUI” per se even though it would render graphical content (sort of like mednafen). compared to legacy mplayer, mpv is extremely enlightened around licensing, portability, and so on, and usually provides the best possible implementation of hardware decoding with the least possible overhead on a given platform. if you don’t need a lot of other server features, I would recommend mpv or mpv frontends across the board these days.
VLC, otoh, sort of originated as the anti-mplayer. it’s always been stalwartly open source, but there’s almost nothing Linuxy about it, it never followed upstream ffmpeg very closely in terms of codec support, and has historically been crammed full of every feature you can imagine, using desktop GUI frameworks that are totally discombobulated and multiple milieus behind on the many platforms it supports. VLC is great too! probably more people have used VLC on Windows to watch then-exotic files than on any other platform, and it solved a lot of catch-as-catch-can format issues back in the day. mpv will never add features like an HTTP server remote control and VLC is still very good for those.
in general, you should very rarely need a media player outside of these 2 families, but both are very good in their own way
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fuck it y’all eclipse
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That’s some good context. What I need a video player for is scanning through recorded videos to grab screenshots and time stamps. VLC was all right at that, but on my computer would crash hard–sometimes the whole machine–when running the default renderers, so I had to run older renderers that were slower to scan with, and not as reliable for capturing screenshots, and still prone to occasional soft freezes; also, I don’t think VLC had a frame-back navigation function, which was a pain. MPV doesn’t seem to have those problems, and I’m finding all sorts of little quality-of-life features that I didn’t find in VLC, like a dark theme (hm although the font is a little too bright, oh well), configurable mouse controls, configurable scan jump ranges, etc.
Oh and MPV doesn’t need an installer. Maybe there was a version of VLC that didn’t? If there was, I wasn’t using it, which was dumb.
One area where VLC is way better than MPV is the icon image it assigns to associated files–MPV’s is really ugly and glaring. https://iconarchive.com/ and filetypesman-x64 (FileTypesMan - Alternative to 'File Types' manager of Windows , per https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-change-file-and-folder-icons-in-windows-10) have taken care of that, though. : D
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lol i switched to sublime text and it’s notepad++ but looks way better. good enough for me
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yeah, Notepad++ is perfectly good, but the idea of having a fancy text editor that’s Windows only (the name is telling in this case) was like… much longer lived than it probably should’ve been, because after the mid 2000s, most people writing code or anything else would’ve been doing so on other platforms some if not most of the time, and Sublime has been around for 15 years
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And I slow down my speed in connection.
Bad Old Days
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Had to finally move my Windows taskbar from the bottom to the right. I hate it but vertical real estate is so valuable. I miss 16:10 monitors.
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I ran windows update on my work thinkpad and now the only things on the taskbar are: an icon of a person with a magnifying glass and sparkles, and the weather
fantastic
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Not terribly sad that windows 11 doesn’t work on my apparently ancient 7700k
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There are pretty simple ways around that if you want to switch to W11 with that CPU after they deprecate W10
I feel like I’m going to become BenRen but for Windows 10. Ben 10
wait
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