Magnus Åhall

Been using the Kensington Expert Wireless a couple of years now.

My go to smartphone keyboard is MessagEase. A few larger buttons instead of many small. You can get quite fast on it, and larger buttons means fewer mistakes.

What, no websocket-based realtime statistics for number of total, daily and hourly mistypings?

In Sweden we have had a version of self checkout for 20 years in the largest stores, and here it seems to work fine.

Instead of having to scan everything at a station, each product is scanned with a handscanner when walking through the store, and put directly into shopping bags. Then only the payment and possibly a randomly occuring verification is left before leaving the store.

The random testing is usually just an employee scanning three to five items from your bags, and occurs like once every four months (as long as you’re not actually stealing and caught).

Last 25 years I have been using a couple of different tiling window managers. My main workstations usually have four monitors, accessed by AltGr+number.

I heavily base my workflow on virtual desktops, accessed by Ctrl+number.

Each virtual desktop have a specific type of programs on it:

1. Development
2. Terminals
3. Browsers
4. Communication / documentation
5. Multimedia
6. Graphics
7. SQL
8. Debugging
9. Email
10. Virtual machines / monitoring

So with this I can access nearly every program with AltGr+number, Ctrl+number which is quite quick. As long as I remember the monitor I placed it on, I always know which virtual desktop.

I use chained keyboard shortcuts for window manager shortcuts, here: https://files.ahall.se/images/i3-keybindings.svg (old one, this has grown a bit…)

The chaining allows me to easier remember shortcuts with mnemonics, and they are fast enough, especially considering the amount of shortcuts I can scale it to.

• Alt+T to start the chain, L for Layout, R for Resize.
• Alt+T, R for Run, I for Inkscape.
• Alt+T, A for Audio, N for Next.

There are some exceptions for the most used focus- and window moving operations, as well as for managing a clipboard buffer system. There are too many times when one goes back and forth to copy something, paste it somewhere else and going back for the previous one. So I can copy something, press Ctrl+Shift+3 to put in buffer 3. After a few other copy/pastes, I bring it into clipboard again with Ctrl+Alt+3. This also allows me to for example reload a page I’m working on and login with user/pass easily accessible in buffer 1 and 2, or login to four different network devices again and again without going to a text file and copying one of four passwords each and every time.

I wrote a special session manager via socket for i3 to be able to press Ctrl+number and go to a certain predefined desktop on the current monitor I’m at.

I’m still using a Kinesis Contoured daily with PS/2 connection. Pretty impressed a new motherboard still came with a combo mouse/keyboard PS/2 port.

Oh god, I had a guy on work practise a couple of weeks. He was about 15, and pressed capslock, another key, and then capslock again for capital letters.

I suddenly stormed into the room screaming, with a knife. I plucked out the capslock key, and ran out of the room, still screaming. Then I popped my head back in through the door in a much calmer fashion and told him he would get the key back after his practise time at our company.

After 25 years of using vim I have replaced a lot of otherwise useful reflexes and brain capacity with vim keybindings (using a swedish variant of Dvorak none the less). I am way too old for needing a cheat sheet stuck on the keyboard, and it would even then be wrong not using QWERTY.

Try a stream deck, each key is also a small monitor for customizable button actions.

I have been using key shortcut chaining in my WMs for freeing up more application hotkeys and also make them easier to remember. And it it still quite fast.

Starts them off by Ctrl+T, then for example: A (Audio) - [P, Pause; N; Next; V, Volume] R (Run) - [B, Browser; I, Inkscape; S, Spotify; Q, SQL editor]

And a lot more. The mnemonics helps me remember them, and Ctrl+T, R, B is quick enough to launch a browser.