Sophomore year of my undergrad was a time of experimentation with my workflow. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on configuring i3 and distro hopping to find the “perfect” setup. Looking back I wish I spent more time on learning the fundamentals of CS, but life is an exhaustive search problem and sometimes you end going down the wrong rabbit hole.

Along the way I found that in writing Java and C++ for classwork, the most time consuming action was jumping to the end of a line to insert a semicolon. Removing my hands from the home row to hit the arrow keys was too time consuming and was starting to cause some RSI problems in my right hand.

Discovering settings.json

VSCode was my editor of choice back in those days after trying Atom for a good while. VSCode’s strength is its customization and I soon realized that many of the bindings that I used for i3 could be adapted to VSCode. At the time, the only terminal editor I knew of was Nano.

VSCode isn’t a modal editor nor did I know what a modal editor would be, but I made do with what I had. With my super key taken by i3, I turned the left ctrl key into my edit mode equivalent.

In my mind, IJKL made sense as a left hand version of WASD. So the first custom binding I created was ctrl+IJKL to move between white spaces and lines vertically. Next I added ctrl+; to jump to the end of a line. This was amazing to me. I could quickly move within a line on up and down a line, edit some code, and essentially double tap semicolon to finish off a line.

Eventually I added some other motions that mimicked the behavior of left hand control on the right hand, but I didn’t use them much.

Discovering Vim Motions

I used my janky custom bindings for about a year until I discovered Vim motions. On initial discovery I didn’t think it had much to offer over my own bindings, but soon I learned about the different compound motions and commands built into vim. After a weekend of learning the different modes, and the common motions, I moved to vim motions full time in all my editors.

Vim motions has truly changed my life. I use them everywhere I can, including obsidian where I’m writing this blog post right now.

Human Computer Interfaces

I think that keyboard based Human computer interfaces still have considerable room for improvement. The fact that just a little bit of thought from a college sophomore can cause the similar solutions to keyboard inefficiency to emerge completely separately is incredible.

Recently I used the new Meta Ray Bans Display on a trip to SF. The neural band tech was absolutely mind blowing. I truly felt that it was the future. Not a big fan of Meta, but I can’t wait for that tech to trickle down into everyday tech like a smartphone or laptop. Soon we will have both intuitive and powerful methods of computer interaction enabled by new hardware and on-board compute which is exciting.

LLMs are really close to making natural language interfaces usable for the majority of people, we just need a more discrete and convenient way to input text that agents can then expand and act upon. I’m excited for what the future of HCI is.