reallychris

right, so as the title suggests...

i like linux based OSes because you can pretty much mould your operating system to the shape of your brain. i call it cognitive ergonomy. and i'd like it to catch on. even on a relatively play-it-safe distro like the one i'm currently using, the repos are full of handy little applications to make life immeasurably easier for you, if they aren't installed already. thanks to xdotool, xdo, wmctrl, and sxhkd, pretty much any action can easily be bound to a shortcut key. for eg, i have xdotool search --name vimnote windowactivate || kitty --title=vimnote nvim -c "norm 13j" ~/notes/index.md bound to mod+n. it's so simple, and i was so proud of myself when i got it to work (i'm not really a scripty person). i just wanted to make something easy. then i wanted to make it a bit easier. then i was feeling like "idk this is still way too many key presses" so i found a way of making it even easier.

i've got a bunch of little hacks like this. before i found qmmp, i set up global keys for mpv so i could listen to podcasts on another workspace. i have ranger set up to give specific info from mediainfo as a preview for audio and video files. (which windows does easily in gui file browser but THAT'S NOT THE POINT OK)

anyway, the ubuntu forums and arch wiki are full of tricks that a lot of people want to set up, i'm curious as to the ones you had to set up for yourself.

like the title says, i've been trying to replicate the snippet functionality of vim ultisnips, so i can expand "fn" into find ./ '*$1* , and then at $1 i can type "or" to expand to find ./ \( -name '*$1*' -o -name '*$2*' $3 \) $4. if i need to add a third pattern to that i can add onm at $4 to expand into -o -name '*$1*' $2 where i can add yet another onm at $2, or "! or" to add a bunch of patterns i can exclude. i have a bunch of these set up in neovim, for a bunch of commands, and they save me so much time, but when it comes to writing them in the terminal it feels like i'm typing in porridge.

i know i can open the current line in $EDITOR, and this is super useful, but it still breaks my flow more than i'd like, and unless the command is particularly long and awkward it's easier just to bash it out like a caveman.

there's also a tool called "pet", but despite going over the github page a few times, i can't work out whether it will offer the ability to nest snippets like this. it seems like it's just a glorified version of the functions i can set in my zshrc, where i'd need to write all the various combinations of the find command (for eg), rather than the flexibility of ultisnips. if you use pet and can confirm that it does this, then consider the thread closed ha.

sorry for the long post. i'm not really a codey scripty person, i'm just somebody who installed linux mint a few years back and realised that the command line is sort of really cognitively ergonomic (most of the time).

I know i've let this get a bit messy but eh it's a new community for me so I'm letting my hair down and posting some unix porn.

Look in the top left, I've bound workspaces to asdzxc. Cool eh? I wish tiling window managers did that. Can't have split keyboards on a laptop.