Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "keypresses"
-
Home office / lockdown story
Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.8 -
!quiteRant
Since I'm working for 3 years as a parttime software engineer, I started to feel my tendon sheath more and more, sometimes it was hurting so I decided to have a look around on ergonomic keyboards, because in the office we only have these flat, thin wireless keyboards which are the fucking opposite of ergonomic.
They feel like when Eddie Scissorhands has to cut hair of a pile of rocks.
So after some reviews I decided to buy a Kinesis Advantage2 (made in the USA of Americas) eventhough it is quite expensive (379 Kanuckistan Kopeks).
I must say this keyboard is fucking well engineered. You can remap every key in a few keypresses and it is stored on the keyboard itself, no software required... awesome!
The disadvantage for me is, being pretty tall I have very wide shoulders so the 2 keyboard pits are a bit too close together in my oppinion.
The other thing is, you really have to get used to it... I am slowly advancing in speed and it feels great. No pain anymore and I don't have to move my hands at all.
So what are your experiences with keyboards and does your workplace have a good setup for staying healthy?19 -
Want maximum efficiency in python?
def say(text):
print(text)
You save 2 keypresses everytime you print16 -
I don't know about you, but a double-digit percentage of my swearing aloud while using a computer takes place when a site uses its javascript bullshit to grab my keypresses, so that when I hit the slash key to search the text of the page(something I do A LOT), it instead moves my focus to their own search field, where I will be halfway through typing before I see that the hijacking has taken place. Today I wondered if this was annoying to anyone else, and found that yes, yes it is. Maybe it annoys you too, so here.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/...6 -
A customer once wanted buttons that would close the mask in an interface where the only way to close the mask was to click a default "OK" button. 🤔
So in the end we implemented a script on the customer's buttons that would send a calculated number of multiple keypresses of tab, tab, tab and finally enter on the default button. 🤑
It is still running in production and I will never ever touch it again! 😁 -
Finally, fucking finally I fixed a damn bug that seems to be freaking popular on asus machines. This damn bug captures the fn keys needed to regulate the screen brightness.
All tools that display your keypresses didn't find them at all and I had a pretty tough time find the source of problem.
You can create as many arch memes as you want but you cannot deny that the they are truly MVPs imo.
Today I also:
* Fixed and refactored a bit of code
* added shortcuts for volume and keyboard backlight control
* Installed lots of fonts
* Got Steam to run
* Found out the meaning behind the Arch linux
* Felt disgusting using windows 10. Learned that 10 stands for the number of minuts before I must vomit 🤢
* Learned a bunch of linux stuff
But most importantly
*installed sl -
The data at the bottom are statistics regarding my key presses. It's literally every key pressed on this laptop since 2024-12-08. Since that date I entered a total of unique 925450 unique inputs. I did 4751951 keyboard inputs.
I know from 595 hours exactly what i've done for tasks (described by LLM based on my keylog data).
I type 107 lines per hour on average (return presses) based on 595 hours. With that logic, i did around 63925 lines.
I'm not very happy with the statistics, especially not because backspace is a hardcore first. Now, while i'm typing i'm focusing on how much I use it and it's not a lot at all.
But the thing is, if you remove abcdef, you have one a, one b, but six times back space. And these are real presses - not keyboard repeats. Also abcdef will be counted by the tag counter as a whole. Everything is a tag until it sees a new line or a white space or some punct.
Funny is that there are completely different keys on the list than I expected. You're so you used to those keys that you don't even notice using them.
I'm almost considering to add a sound under the backspace button to teach myself WHEN i use it and try to avoid it.
The key logger database is now 346Mb. Some overhead because every keypress takes around 40 chars of description (timestamp, press type, char, input device).
Creating statistics for the tags (unique words typed) takes several minutes. Already rewriting that part to C. The stats are made by python, the key logs with C.
I'm just shocked, I used 144644 times a key that I think not to use that much? :P How retoorded can you be. Imagine if i actually fixed typo's :P
But based on these keys you can see that i'm mainly working in terminal / vim. The 'i' for insert for example, typed so many times. The 'x' for save+quit. The '0' to go to beginning of line.
Did you expect that these buttons would've been the most used?
#0 BACKSPACE is pressed 144644 times (15.63% of total input)
#1 UP is pressed 92711 times (10.02% of total input)
#2 LEFT_SHIFT is pressed 73777 times (7.97% of total input)
#3 ENTER is pressed 63883 times (6.9% of total input)
#4 DOWN is pressed 56838 times (6.14% of total input)
#5 TAB is pressed 43635 times (4.72% of total input)
#6 RIGHT is pressed 37710 times (4.07% of total input)
#7 SPACE is pressed 34438 times (3.72% of total input)
#8 LEFT is pressed 26800 times (2.9% of total input)
#9 LEFT_CTRL is pressed 25402 times (2.74% of total input)
#10 LEFT_ALT is pressed 17289 times (1.87% of total input)
#11 I is pressed 12856 times (1.39% of total input)
#12 X is pressed 6106 times (0.66% of total input)
#13 A is pressed 5163 times (0.56% of total input)
#14 0 is pressed 4487 times (0.48% of total input)
#15 PAGEDOWN is pressed 4151 times (0.45% of total input)5