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12:42 AM
@Jesse_b only if by "virtually" you mean "among those people reachable in the virtual world of the internet." ;)
 
 
2 hours later…
2:30 AM
@Wildcard sure; I'm doing my best to live up to the name :) Sorry to hear about the major surgery, but glad to hear they're on the road to recovery. I've been playing with the page break / no-page-break idea, and still need to get some signature lines put out there. Nothing major to report.
 
 
8 hours later…
10:06 AM
How would one use gsub() to remove a character (zero in this case) after another character (the dash symbol) in a specific column? The column has a year, month, day format as follows; 2006-02-01. The desired output would be 2006-2-1.
 
10:19 AM
@Kusalananda when you migrated that question from meta to main, did you get any indication that post with an identical title existed on main? (just checking, if you didn't, it feels like a bug, or at least something that you should be alerted about)
 
10:40 AM
@muru No, no indication. I deleted the Meta post and the migrated question when I discovered that the user had re-posted the question on the main site.
In hindsight, I should have looked at the user's questions on the main site before migrating.
 
 
5 hours later…
3:29 PM
@Wildcard I don't know if what I do is touch typing. I do use both hands, though.
I hear rumors Dvorak is better. Never tried it, though.
 
careful, you might burn your keyboard like Kusalananda did
Be Kind to Keyboards: Use QWERTY!
 
@JeffSchaller as the French say, you’ve said too much or too little!
 
@JeffSchaller I read somewhere that QUERTY was invented to force people to type slowly. If true, that's quite a recommendation.
@JeffSchaller Fire Burning On The Kusalananda Keyboard. Somebody call 911.
 
@StephenKitt I've said neither such thing!
Kusalananda's profile pic used to be of his keyboard with some sort of "burnt" filter on it. That was probably too obscure, sorry :)
(and he uses DVORAK, last I knew)
@FaheemMitha wikipedia (so it must be true!?!?) says so: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY
 
3:46 PM
@JeffSchaller ah, right!
 
@JeffSchaller Yes, we all know that Wikipedia is the fount of all knowledge.
 
(that, plus the subtle hint that DVORAK would allow you type faster, possibly quickly enough to cause something to catch fire)
Aug 12 at 14:34, by Kusalananda
Late summer's thunderstorm over here.
Aug 12 at 14:36, by Jeff Schaller
@Kusalananda so that's what happened to your keyboard
I like that French quote, though!
 
@JeffSchaller « tu en as trop dit ou pas assez » in the original
meaning you haven’t said enough to explain everything, but you’ve said too much to not continue explaining
 
@FaheemMitha Dvorak is obviously better. Just get me to type my password on a QWERTY keyboard and see me fail time and time again.
 
@StephenKitt very nice; thank you! Reminds me of an REM lyric
 
3:52 PM
@Kusalananda Did you buy a Dvorak keyboard, or still use a QUERTY one?
 
> Oh no I've said too much // I haven't said enough
 
@FaheemMitha I have so far not seen a Dvorak keyboard anywhere for sale. But then again I haven't looked too hard for one. I rearranged the keys on three keyboards (one laptop and two "ordinary" ones) and I've used stickers on two laptop keyboards to relabel them as Dvorak.
 
@Kusalananda Is rearranging the keys possible? And stickers come off.
 
@JeffSchaller that’s me in the corner
@FaheemMitha you can pop off most keys on most keyboards and rearrange them
 
Rearranging the keys on ordinary keyboards is usually really simple. On laptops it's a bit fiddly and you run the risk of damaging the key caps. Stickers made for relabelling keyboards may wear out, but so far, none have actually come off.
 
4:00 PM
K types so fast he turns all his keyboards into this one: daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-ultimate
 
it only messes up the home row indicators and you can’t do it on Lenovo keyboards with a nibble
 
@JeffSchaller Not really. But I've looked at that keyboard longingly at times :-)
 
@StephenKitt @Kusalananda Oh, is it (rearranging keys)? I wasn't aware of that.
 
there are available in Dvorak (and Bépo): typematrix.com
 
@StephenKitt Do you use Dvorak?
 
4:02 PM
and there are a number of mechanical keyboards available with blank keycaps (or you can buy blank keycaps)
@FaheemMitha no, I’m an AZERTY freak (which surprises quite a few people since it’s typically considered a poor fit for programming)
in fact I’m a fr(oss) keymap fiend, with all the extra keysyms
æâ€êþÿûîœôäßë‘’ðüïŀö«»© ↓¬¿×÷¡ etc.
 
what does AZERTY have over QWERTY? Except a commonly used vowel in a more awkward position?
 
@StephenKitt AZERTY? is that a thing?
 
@ilkkachu accented characters
 
ok, right
 
@StephenKitt Are you using one of those TypeMatrix keyboards?
The grid layout put me off.
 
4:12 PM
@Kusalananda I used one in the past, I prefer mechanical keyboards though; and yes, the grid layout takes a little while to get used to!
 
enter & backspace keys in the middle of the keyboard! huh!
 
@StephenKitt I can imagine.
The only thing about DASKeyboard that I don't like is the big wheel thing. I don't use any of the multimedia or other exrta keys on any keyboard.
I would probably feel quite at home with one of these: hhkeyboard.com
 
The other-other thing I don't like about the DASKeyboard is convincing my wife that I should spend $170 on a keyboard
@Kusalananda there's a keyboard that the French (and I!) would agree with: doesn't have too much, doesn't have too little :)
Inspired by a UNIX professional! hhkeyboard.us/about
 
@JeffSchaller you could always try to explain that it’s half the price of the ultimatehackingkeyboard.com
you’d actually be saving money!
 
> machined, pickled, lacquered, and finally fixated to a powder-coated steel plate
lol
 
4:27 PM
"pickled"?
 
I thought it's supposedly good to have commonly used keys in the middle. And I'm not sure if backspace and enter count to that. I mean, I usually hit enter only once per line, and there are many letters that appear more than once in an average line...
does Das Keyboard always come with that low (US-style?) enter key like the photos seem to indicate?
 
@ilkkachu all the images at daskeyboard.com/products/mechanical-keyboards seem to indicate so; I haven't yet seen anything about customizing the keys
 
4:40 PM
exactly
 
@ilkkachu Also with EU Enter key: nordickeyboards.se/product/52605
 
4:57 PM
anybody good with .tmux.conf? can't get prefix2 to work the way I want despite lots of searching posts and reading the manual
 
@tehnyaz How are you trying to set the secondary prefix?
set-option -g prefix2 C-a should work to set it to Ctrl+A.
Or, directly from the command line: tmux set-option -g prefix2 C-a
 
right, but how do I then bind a command using that prefix2 and a key that is uniquely different from using the default prefix and pressing that same key? do I have to create a custom key table for that instead of using prefix 2?
it seems like when I try to bind anything using prefix2 that it just does the command that is already linked to prefix for that key
I have
 
@tehnyaz As far as I know, the secondary prefix is just another key combo that acts just like the primary prefix. What is it that you're trying to do and what have you tried so far? Maybe this would be better suited as a question on the main site?
 
i basically just want a button that acts like prefix but does something different when the same key after is pressed. e
 
"the same key after"?
 
5:11 PM
e.g. C-b then 'i' does something different then C-a then 'i'
I thought 'prefix i' and 'prefix2 i' would accomplish this but it seems prefix2 is just an alias for prefix
 
Yes, as far as I know, the secondary prefix is just another key combo that acts like the prefix. It may be useful in situations where you have nested tmux sessions, for example when you log into a system form a tmux session and there start another one.
Having a distinct secondary prefix on the "inner" tmux would allow you to more easily manipulate that tmux session.
 
okay so prefix2 is not what I would need to do what I'm describing.
 
5:49 PM
@Kusalananda you can get a WASD keyboard. (That's a brand, not a layout.) Or the CODE keyboard, which is a collaboration between WASD keyboards and Jeff Atwood. You can customize what the keys will look like—and there's a hardware DIP switch which will make the keyboard Dvorak instead of QWERTY.
@Kusalananda I like the WASD keyboards approach to media keys. They're actually very usable. AND they're standard keyboard keys, easily reachable for one-handed use, but they're mechanical keys rather than something else.
Kinda weird to pay top dollar for a mechanical keyboard, and have the media keys be some other type of switch that will last far fewer than the 50 million key presses the rest of the keyboard will stand up to....
I use a CODE keyboard with Cherry MX Green switches.
@JeffSchaller the keynote is how much time you spend using a keyboard. Making that smooth and enjoyable with professional equipment is very sensible. Assuming you're not completely struggling financially, of course, and that your computer work brings in the money (or most of it) in the family.
 
6:20 PM
@Wildcard a hardware switch to change the keyboard layout is something I really don't get. Because that just has to depend on the OS having some particular keyboard layout set, others be damned.
one might get away with it if the switch only shuffles the letters around, and all you have is QWERTY-based keymaps
which reminds me of some horrid remote console setup where the keypresses were sent as scancodes at some point (the remote emulating a hardware keyboard), so the software had to convert back from characters to scancodes
which basically only worked with the local desktop set to a US keymap
otherwise, say goodbye to, e.g. the backslash.
 
@ilkkachu Yeah... I thought the same.
Thanks for mentioning a few other brands @Wildcard, I'll look them up.
 
 
1 hour later…
7:36 PM
@ilkkachu I don't see why.
@ilkkachu incidentally, WASD is working on firmware to allow arbitrarily programmable keyboard customization. But I don't know to what extent that would work with foreign layouts.
Hi @Caleb
 
 
1 hour later…
9:05 PM
@Wildcard well, usually you have a known mapping from keys to scan codes, so the keymaps in the OS work based on that. The button that gives - and _ in the US keymap gives + and ? in the Nordic keymap, but the scan code is the same. But if the keyboard were to shuffle the scan codes around, the keymaps on the OS level would need to be modified to be aware of that.
Anyway, having the translation in the hardware isn't really necessary, since every OS already has that in software...
 
9:54 PM
In my adventures with keyboards, I've never ever had to fiddle with hardware switches.
 
10:45 PM
@Kusalananda Adventures with Keyboards. Now, that's a TV series waiting to happen.
 
@ilkkachu I think the point is more if you deal with lots of different computers. In which case having it in the hardware is awesome, and the scan code to character mapping only needs to account for the lowest common denominator i.e. the de facto standard for the country.
@ilkkachu I just remembered, the WASD keyboards come in two models, one is US and the other is ISO. I have the US model.
@Kusalananda it's actually nice. For example, I have the switch flipped that makes the caps lock key into an extra Ctrl. I don't have to worry about doing that in software.
 
@Wildcard Oh, that sort of thing. Right. I would be too confused by a Ctrl key labelled CapsLock, so I haven't done things like that.
 
@Kusalananda ah, but on WASD keyboards you can also customize all the keycaps. :) By color and/or by label.
 

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