Hexnut @ambihelical@qoto.org

I was looking at arm microcontrollers for a project at work recently. This is not something I have done in a while. Some of the newer ones have features like page protection and secure enclave support that I’ve never seen at that level before. Seems like progress. #microcontroller #trustzone #iot

I mean, you can post 50 times a day but I for one, and I suspect many others, will never follow you. I follow tags though, so put more tags in your firehose stream and I may see and interact with some of the ones that interest me. #mastodon #etiquette

@deech I think it’s how much career growth and money are you willing to give up for those tools you really want to use and not what everyone else is using.

Bored this evening and thinking about #emacs defaults due to posts by @kickingvegas and @summeremacs

I wonder if adopting something like Rust’s edition scheme would be the narrow path that would satisfy everyone. So a variable e.g. emacs-edition would control what defaults you get. If it’s not set, it defaults to the legacy defaults, which are whatever they are before the 1st edition. If it is set to a a particular revision, you get the defaults which were active in that revision. If it’s set to ‘build you get the defaults of the build you are using. If set to e.g. 29, you never get any 30 defaults, but you could get 29.1, 29.2, 29.3, etc.

No clue how practical this is, and it’s just a thought, and not a very deep one. Assuming someone implemented it, the hard part would be what color to paint the next edition’s bike shed, I’m sure.

Some pvc pipe percussion and lead shovel for ya

https://youtu.be/2aSJ5gUbzaY

Continuing my exploration of #meow keybindings for #emacs, I’m finding that just the process of getting ready to use meow is causing quite a few changes to my configuration, independent of meow, for the better:

1. I am very habituated to having a bunch of vim-like keybindings for window (in the emacs sense) management which are under C-w in vim and evil. This won’t fly for meow, so I finally started using super bindings, adding s-w as the first super binding, and avoiding evil functions for these. I’ve been avoiding super for a long time since I use the windows key as super under linux. In ms-windows that key by default brings up the windows menu, and I decided not to rock that boat. With the pressure on to have at least a few comfortable vim-like bindings, I found a way to allow the window key to be used for super under windows, without much restriction (win-l and win-g being the exceptions).

2. I use the capslock for my i3 modifier key, and didn’t have an equivalent for windows. Mapping this key to the old windows-key functionality turned out to be super easy with powertoys, and it’s kind of analogous to the i3 modifier, if you squint a little. The linux key mapping is to hyper, while windows hyper has been appropriated by MS to be something completely useless and difficult–maybe impossible–to bind to a key. So this seems like a good use of an available key, and I don’t want to keep the original caps-lock functionality as it’s really rather useless and can be a foot gun when typing in passwords.

3. I had been binding M-w for other-window, that usage was already provided by a subbinding of C-w and now s-w. This allows some workarounds I had for magit to be removed, and allows using the binding when evil is not active.

4. I’ve for a long time bound the function keys as sort of a keyboard driven menu system organized around errr… functional groups of frequently used commands. As I will need to use emacs macros if I stick with meow, I needed to provide something equivalent to f3 and f4. So I moved the kmacro original definitions to C-f3 and C-f4 respectively. I am hoping this works out with meow.

I’m not sure I’ll continue with meow (I still haven’t finished the tutorial because of all these yaks to be shaved), but the changes its been driving are quite useful and will be helpful if I ever drop evil.

My third session trying out #meow….

My strategy with trying meow is the same as #emacs when I switched from #vim in 2015. I’m noodling around with it on a branch of my dotfiles repo. Basically I give myself low pressure editting tasks to see if I’m really ready to roll with the new setup. When I’m comfortable with that, I’ll try it for work tasks. My current task is editing my init.el file (using meow bindings) to convert it to #meow. I was able to remove all the evil config successfully but it is incredibly awkward atm. Other than not really getting meow bindings, the other stumbling points are kind of surprising since so much of this is very automatic after many decades:

1. Window (in the emacs sense) management. I relied on C-w commands provided by evil. I’ve been able to replace these with various other commands under the C-w binding, mostly leveraging the built-in winmove.

2. Undo and redo. Although meow has an undo, there’s no redo binding. I don’t like the emacs bindings, so I decided to go more mainstream on this one and use C-z and S-C-z for undo and redo respectively. I’ve never used C-z to suspend emacs, so it doesn’t seem like a huge loss.

3. Saving files. I used evil commands for these. The emacs bindings are ok, so I’m training myself to use C-x C-s. I’m already used to C-x C-c so this seems consistent.

4. Searching and replacing in current buffer. I really liked / and the :s///gc vim commands. C-s is a poor substitute so far. Still working on this.

Surprisingly, other than text editing, things are going well. I’m able to use 90% of emacs without issue. I still don’t grok meow bindings yet, so next is getting up to speed on actually editing.