Yes, but most Europeans tend to underestimate how expensive medicine is in the USA, from personal experience here in Spain an ambulance ride to the hospital + consultation + x-ray is free for residents and costs €200 for tourists, whereas the same stuff in the USA can cost around $5000 even for residents.
As a general rule yeah you can, however the price for stuff if you’re not insured is very expensive, but it will likely still be much cheaper than the USA, and also if it’s not an emergency you might have trouble being able to get to a doctor. Let me give you an example, we were visiting Spain when my wife fell and twisted her ankle, we had to call an ambulance, she had an emergency consultation with an X-RAY (luckily she didn’t broke anything), and because we had forgotten our sanitary card we had to pay foreign prices, i.e. €200. That looks expensive to us because if we had brought that card it would have been free, but that same thing in the US could cost us $5000 so overall lot cheaper.
That being said, in Ireland for my wife to go to an Endocrinologist we had to:
Overall cost was around €1000 and took us over a month to go through all of that. And again this might feel cheap for you, but to us feels expensive. And because of the initial requirement to register with the GP tourists can’t do it. Not sure how other countries work, in Spain we book stuff through our insurance and just show the insurance card and haven’t paid anything in over a year.
Why not use thefuck which also corrects typos?
I understand, and I agree, although I’m reading all the replies are already becoming wall of text so I’ll skip parts but I have read them and they’re all interesting.
I’ve landed on Night.
That looks interesting, although I would be weary of learning a layout that only works on specific keyboards, it will make it hard for you to use a laptop on the go, work in an office with a normal keyboard or any other similar situation.
Furthermore, how bad did things become?
I think it’s easier if I answer this first. At the worst I had problems holding heavy stuff in my hand, as in fingers lackesld strength or didn’t respond properly. And for my lower back at the worst it was constant pain where I needed to lay down with a pillow on my lumbar to stretch. After fixing those I became very aware of the initial feelings, such as numbness or feeling pain when stretching (which btw I strongly recommend you check out wrist and finger stretching exercises as they help a lot). Lots of the changes I made (e.g. split ortholinear keyboard) were probably not needed, but the wrist pain that kickstarted everything got me worry enough that I don’t want to take any chances.
After a couple of hours, I do experience strange sensations that border on pain. Furthermore, there’s (almost) always some level of unease/discomfort. Thankfully, resting continues to feel good and I get especially revitalized after sleeping well. But I acknowledge that this isn’t sustainable.
It’s not, those are exactly the early signals that you asked me about, you think that because you’re able to rest and stretch and it goes away that it’s all fine, but it will require ever more stretching and resting until they don’t go away ever. At least that’s what happened to me, at the beginning I would stretch my wrist and fingers and rest for a while and be fine, eventually that became next day I’ll be fine, then over the weekend, then never.
Wrist pain and fingers that feel wacky. So, this is basically carpal tunnel 101.
That’s exactly what I had, although mine was never actually diagnosed, but I had all of the symptoms and my dad had to do the surgery so I have family history. It does get better if you adjust, I don’t feel any of the symptoms I once did, and it is sustainable I haven’t had any symptoms in about 10 years since I switched to a more keyboard centric flow and the layout, so putting in the work does help out. I should say I had 24 years when the symptoms first appeared, so it was kindof young which was one of the reasons I got very scared about getting those symptoms so early.
org-mode seems to be Emacs’ forte.
Org-mode is absolutely wonderful, I haven’t tried any replacement because the reason I abandoned org-mode wasn’t emacs related, I kept using emacs for org-mode for a while after I dropped it as my main editor. The reason is that there’s no compatibility with other editors or apps. Everything uses markdown, and for most basic stuff markdown is good enough. I do miss habit tracking, task management, table calculations and other neat stuff, but the commodity of using the same format for everything and that other people use it as well outweighs all of that for me.
I don’t consider myself hardcore, but I haven’t posted to Reddit since the API thing, I read stuff there because there’s lots of content, but I strongly dislike the official app so I refuse to use it, which means posting would be a hassle.
One of my favorite games is a hidden gem that I never see people mention. It’s called Out of Space and it’s a couch co-op game similar to Overcooked with two major differences, it’s less frenetic so you can play it to chill out, and it’s procedurally generated so you have lots of replayability. For me and my wife it’s the perfect game of “let’s play a round of something”, yet I never see it mentioned anywhere.
Curious to see this at the very top of your list. Perhaps I should make my switch to Sway rather sooner than later. Thank you for the endorsement!
For me it was a lot off wrist pain, so switching to a more keyboard centric way of interacting with the WM was very impactful.
I intend to learn this with the alt keyboard layout after the more ergonomic split keyboard has arrived. Wish me good luck 😉!
Which alternate layout are you considering? I recommend grabbing something you typed and feeding it here to check heat map of keypresses you would have done to have some visual representation of your usage.
So I suppose that by effectively removing most need for a mouse, the switch to a trackball has been less impactful.
Bingo, I actually switched to trackball before going to keyboard centric WM, but after it I’ve even gone back to mouse a few times feeling almost no difference, because I end up using the mouse a lot less.
Btw, perhaps related, would you happen to be aware of hints? If so, could you touch upon its relevance?
I have, not exactly it but similar stuff, I used to use a browser called conkeror that had emacs key bindings, and have tried to learn a very similar system to hints in the past. Honestly, when I has lots of wrist pain they were useful to completely remove the need of a mouse, but they’re clunky and not as efficient as a pointer so I tend not to use them.
Curious. Is this a special ergonomic chair (or something)?
Nope, just a Secret Lab Titan Evo, but any good chair would do, I spent a year with a cheap Amazon chair and had lots of back pain.
Did you advance/progress in increments because you were testing out the latest addition to the setup? And thus, only introduced a subsequent change after judging that you were not ‘done’ yet?
It was more of a gradual thing, I had wrist pain, so I switched to a trackball, that helped but didn’t got rid of it. So I tried AwesomeWM, found Conkeror and slowly the pain started to fade away and I dove deep into the keyboard centric thing learning touch typing and Colemak. Eventually other issues came on, like pinky strain from Emacs, or a different kind of wrist pain from a small keyboard that made me switch to a split one, or back pain that made me invest in a good chair. I don’t think my setup is “done”, it adapts to whatever my body is asking, but I’ve started to listen carefully and switch stuff on the early signals because that first wrist pain was an eye opener on how bad things can get if you ignore them.
I am so glad to read this! While the journey until I am able to interact with my systems without any pain seems far away right now, success stories like yours make me so pumped to pull through.
Do you feel pain now though? If so what? You should address that immediately. At most points I would have answered that I felt no pain with my setup, because those things build up gradually, if you’re at the point of feeling pain the time to take action is now.
About the emacs plugins, yeah, by the name I can tell you those do the same to the ones I cited, my point is that the plugin ecosystem for it might be a bit less extensive, and not sure how to set shortcuts that use vim key bindings for other plugins.
I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.
Why? Having had an emacs config that I copied from somewhere and ended up growing and becoming something unmanageable, I’m have a very strong opinion that one should build your own config files from scratch to know them. Presets are good if you’re going to be using them bare, but if you’re going to customize them they can get in the way. And that’s another point for Nvim for me, their configs are very easy, I followed this guide and had a working config that I could easily expand in no time.
org-mode FTW
Ah, I miss org-mode, it’s too bad the world went with Markdown instead.
Granted, I’m still very much enjoying Emacs. But, I shouldn’t disregard/dismiss Neovim any longer. It’s time to revisit this rabbit hole 😂.
Meh, maybe, maybe not, Emacs is great, I just never would have gone with evil mode, it sort of feels like it defeats the purpose of both emacs and vim in my mind for some reason. It’s like if someone told you they put a Ford engine on their Chevrolet, it feels convoluted and strange to think on that solution before thinking of using a Ford.
Hey, yeah, I know the feeling, every time I lose an already typed reply I completely lose motivation to rewrite it.
Yeah, my pinky strain issue is completely gone, I also used to have some more pain on my wrist which made me go through a very similar journey to you, I took many steps for it to the point where nowadays my setup is (in order of what I think has made the largest impact)
I’ve also got a height adjustable desk and a good chair to prevent issues with my back, and my monitors use an arm to be in the right position. It was a slow process of making one change here, few months later another z etc, but this has been my setup for a few years and all of my pains in wrist, lower back, neck, etc have disappeared. I figured if I’m going to ve sitting in front of a computer typing stuff for 8h a day I need to make that as comfortable as possible to be able to do it for longer.
As for emacs with evil mode I was sure that ci" would work, that’s basic vim functionality, what I’m less sure would work is more complex stuff for which I use plugins, e.g. <space>srq" (Surround Replace Quotes with ") to replace the next quotes for " (e.g. changing var = 'some text' to var = "some text"). That same plugin allows me to also do <space>srb[ to Surround Replace Bracket/Braces with [ (to change the surrounding [, (, or { to [ ). Another plugin allows me to move to any part of the screen in 4 keystrokes, I press s the two characters of where I want to move, and a third disambiguation character and the cursor moves there. Those are advanced usages that I think will be difficult to reproduce in emacs, plus plugins will not incorporate the basic ideas for movements.
May I ask why emacs in evil-mode instead of Nvim?
I can’t speak for OP, but I self host lots of stuff, have literally dozens of services running, have an Ansible repo to manage it all and routi some stuff through a VPS, not to mention my day job has included managing services in one way or another for a long while. This is to say, I know what I’m doing. I couldn’t setup Plex to work the way I wanted to, they expect it to run in a docker with network set to host mode, I couldn’t find any way to tell Plex that my living room TV was in the same network, it just wouldn’t accept any connections as local. I know I shot myself in the foot here by not letting it run with network on host mode, but I shouldn’t have to, the port was exposed, I could reach it through the local network IP, but I wasn’t able to stream any content locally.
Yes, evil-mode would have bridged the gap, however I didn’t go emacs -> vim in one step, I left emacs back in 2017 because of pinky strain, and other ergonomic issues that made me switch keyboard layout as well (which made me lose lots of agility on emacs) and started using Pycharm for python dev, VSCode for other languages (including Markdown for note taking) and nano for system file edition. I tried some of the other suggestions here like atom, sublime, Kate, etc, but they never became my everything tool like emacs used to be. Very recently I discovered Helix, and I gave it a try and loved it, however the lack of plugin support made me have reservations on diving in. But the interaction mode is very close to vim, so I decided to give vim another go and went through a few tutorials on how to set Nvim up while refreshing muscle memory for vim movements and learning new stuff and it’s slowly becoming the everything tool that emacs once was for me.
All of that being said, I don’t think I would use evil-mode on Emacs, the reason is that vim is made with those motions from the ground up, whereas in emacs they will be an after-thought so it will probably not be integrated enough (or more likely will require lots of configurations).
I wasn’t able to see for myself how
cin"worked within Vim*.
It’s simple, imagine you have a line of code like so:
my_var = "some string with spaces"
If your cursor is almost anywhere on that line pressing ci" will erase the contents of inside the string and place you in insert mode, i.e. the line will look line this:
my_var = "|"
With | being the cursor in insert mode. There are other similar things, for example ca" (Change Around ") will also erase the quotes, very useful for example to change a hard coded string with a variable.
If you had started with that people would have told you that nothing comes even close. The closest things you will find are Atom (archived), Sublime (closed source) and Helix (still very new and no plugin support, but something to keep an eye on).
Speaking of obsidian, the reason why it took me forever to start using Silverbullet is that Emacs has org-mode which does most of what Silverbullet/Obsidian do out of the box, plus some other stuff that they don’t do (e.g. excel like tables).
But I wanted something I could edit remotely through my phone and web interfaces are better than using text editors over ssh connections. Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don’t get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you’ve used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ’ (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that’s a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it’s a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).
But those are the reasons why I switched, many people use Emacs for decades without ergonomic issues, whichever of the two you decide to learn you’ll understand why they’re the staple editors for most people who actually choose an editor.
Others have given you many options, but I would like to know why Nvim or Emacs are not good options for you?
Damn, I thought I had sent the reply and it’s been erased.
I’ll keep it short, muscle memory for qwerty doesn’t go away that easily, at least it didn’t for me, but I’m able to type blindly in qwerty (just not touch typing). Still I think that something I can use in my laptop is very useful so I can keep the ergonomics on the go.
I don’t have the exercises, it was just something someone told me to do, I’m sure whatever your doctor is telling you would be better.
For the split vs ortholinear I think split makes more difference, whenever I use a normal keyboard I feel this, but never had any pains related to it, it’s just more comfortable.