What Has Two Thumbs And A Kinesis Advantage2?

This guy!

I know, I know, the joke was stale the first time I used it, I promise I won't do it again.

So, how is it? For starters, it's surprisingly light for its dimensions and much louder than I expected. My TECK is whisper quiet in comparison and both use Cherry Brown switches, so the noise isn't from the switches themselves. Rather, the shape and all the empty space inside act like a resonance chamber, even though I usually don't bottom out when typing. I wonder if filling the inside with foam or similar materials could dampen the noise — I think I've seen at least one person on the Interweb who showed pictures of an Advantage keyboard stuffed with pieces of cloth.

Regarding the dimensions, it's sensibly taller than my TECK, I would guess its height is about that of three membrane keyboards stacked one on top of the other. Unless you use a height-adjustable desk, I would advise following the manual's suggestion and placing it on a keyboard tray attached under the desk, as I ended up doing. Yeah, I'm the kind of guy who actually reads manuals.

In my opinion, the two thumb clusters are somewhat better than those on an Ergodox, but I would have liked them more if they were rotated a few degrees further — clockwise on the left cluster and counterclockwise on the right.

I'll be honest: at first, I thought having the backspace on the left thumb cluster wasn’t a great idea, but after a few days of use, I started to get the means of it. As for the cursor movement keys’ position, I can’t say I’m a fan. Also, I much prefer the symmetric layout of the modifier keys — Ctrl, Shift, and Alt — on the TECK. On the same note, to use the "Super" modifier, the Gnome leader key, I'm forced to sacrifice one of the two Alt keys. Additionally the Esc key is in a such uncomfortable position and it's considered a second class citizen by Kinesis¹ that I remapped the Caps Lock to be another Esc key. Even so I can tell you that is barely usable in Emacs and even in the shell sometimes I would prefer to have an Alt key on the right side of the keyboard.

Another thing I've noticed about the keyboard layout, at least for my hands, is that it's somewhat difficult to make a Ctrl-Shift chord.

About the material used, the key-caps plastic is not bad, but at the same time not exceptional. I would say POM or similar hard plastic with the labels printed on the keys, but no double-shots. I like the blue accent of the keys on the home row, but even if they have a different sculpt to distinguish from the other keys, I would have preferred the classic notch on the F and J to confirm the fingers are on the home row. Sadly no Colemak layout option available even with offering cash, only Dvorak, no surprise there, I know I belong to a niche group of a niche group. Believe me when I say that more than once, coworkers have olled their eyes when I entertained the idea of using layouts other than Qwerty. And they hate me when they start writing on a PC and there's gibberish on the screen.

Anywho, back to my impressions, there is a macro function integrated in the keyboard that could turn out useful, but I have not yet tried to play with it, although it seems more plain than the functions available with the QMk firmware. In my opinion, the clicking tone seems useless, didn't I already write that this thing is loud? I wonder if the internal speaker could be used for other things.

The function keys, if you ask me, still seem a second thought, they are better than el-cheapo first gen rubber buttons, but I'll never be able to touch type with them, they are too far away from the number key row and they are spaced too far apart from each other. The keys with an even number have a little notch in the base, but it's useless in my opinion.

So if you have all read till now you are probably interested in the verdict. So, aiming to be better than a staggered keyboard is placing the bar too low, so yes it's way better than a vanilla run of the mill two centuries old layout membrane USB keyboard, but in my opinion is not the perfect keyboard. Let's see, I would put the two well clusters under "the good", the lacks of full symmetric modifiers under to "the bad" and finally, the function keys to "the ugly" category.

I made a couple of shots of the tray that I literally hacked to my desk, if someone is curious.

P.S. for the record, I purchased the keyboard myself, it's not a test sample generously donated by the manufacturer.

A few weeks later...

After a few weeks of use, I would say — probably against popular opinion — that my old TECK is more comfortable. Also, as you can see in the photos, the two wrist foam pads are starting to look gross, considering I have only been using it for a few weeks. Imagine what they’ll look like after a year.

If you’re wondering, the Ergodox is tucked away in a drawer, collecting dust. I used it for a very short time because, unfortunately, I didn’t find it very comfortable.

Markdown On The Command Line

Greetings people from the Interwebs!

The other day I was in need of creating a brief documentation file for internal use and instead of using a simple text file I thought — "Why not using Markdown and having a kinda readable text file plus a nicely styled HTML document?" —.

Outside this blog I've never really used Markdown or even Org mode to style documents, so I only remember the tags used for the headings, bold and italics, for everything else I need to check the documentation. Nonetheless with minimum effort, basically sprinkling the text with a few '#' and '*' symbols, maximum results with no word processors involved.

I should also add that being an Emacs user I'm probably in the minority not using Org.

Anywho, on my desktop I had already installed the cmark-gfm package (Github Flavored Markdown) to use it with Emacs for rendering Markdown to HTML — or CommonMark in this specific case¹ — but I wasn't able to find mentioned anywhere an utility that was able to add a specific style sheet file to the produced HTML.

It's not a complicated task, it's an header and a footer if we want to be really fancy, with an HTTP link tag that points to the chosen CSS file, it could be done in an editor or with a shell one liner, a plain cat header output.html footer > final-document.html would do the job, but it's clunky and I wanted something completed with a single command.

Maximum Effort

Well, as I should have expected, the Emacs's Markdown mode has hooks that can be used to personalize the output and there is already an example available on the Emacs WiKi where I only needed to add a few touches, so this is what I put in my ever expanding configuration:

(defalias 'markdown-add-xhtml-header-and-footer 
  'as/markdown-add-xhtml-header-and-footer)

(defun as/markdown-add-xhtml-header-and-footer (title)
  "Wrap XHTML header and footer with given TITLE around current buffer."
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (insert "<!DOCTYPE html5>\n"
    "<html>\n"
    "<head>\n<title>")
  (insert title)
  (insert "</title>\n")
  (insert "<meta charset=\"utf-8\" />\n")
  (when (> (length markdown-css-paths) 0)
    (insert (concat
             "<style type=\"text/css\">\n"
             (with-temp-buffer
               (insert-file-contents (car markdown-css-paths))
               (buffer-string))
             "\n.markdown-body {\n"
       "  box-sizing: border-box;\n"
       "  min-width: 200px;\n"
       "  max-width: 980px;\n"
       "  margin: 0 auto;\n"
       "  padding: 45px;\n"
       "}\n\n"
       "@media (max-width: 767px) {\n"
       "  .markdown-body {\n"
       "    padding: 15px;\n"
       "  }\n"
       "}\n"
             "</style>\n")))
  (insert "</head>\n"
    "<body class=\"markdown-body\">\n")
  (goto-char (point-max))
  (insert "</body>\n"
    "</html>\n")))

I prefer to have a copy available locally instead to depend to a file downloaded from a CDN so the code above embed the CSS in the header plus an incantation to add some padding to the page created. By the way the canonical home-page where to find the official CSS used on GitHub is primer.style, but there are many style-sheets to choose from, like for example:

• https://sindresorhus.com/github-markdown-css/
• http://markdowncss.github.io
• http://jasonm23.github.io/markdown-css-themes/

I'm quite sure a query in the reader's favorite search engine would find others.

To complete the function above it requires a couple of tweaks for cmark-gfm's invocation to render tables and the path to the style-sheet file to embed, in this case hidden in my Emacs configuration folder.

(setq markdown-command "cmark-gfm -e table")
(setq markdown-css-paths '("~/.emacs.d/github-markdown.css"))

Colophon

The astute reader would have surely noted that the variable name above is markdown-css-paths — i.e. plural. I haven't deeply investigated how Markdown mode for Emacs works and if there's a way to choose a specific style-sheet from a list, nonetheless my code always picks the first path, if available, from the list.

Or I could have installed Pandoc from the beginning with the bonus of PDF creation...

Mason Build System

Greetings folks,

this is a quick personal remind note on how to specify an installation directory with the Mason build system, as the regular reader would recall I use Stow to install applications compiled from source to avoid tangling the path under /usr/local.

So, the incantation to use at configuration time is --prefix=/installation/path and that should be enough to specify the destination path of binaries and other assets at installation time.

The contest, for the curious reader, I was in need of an utility to control my Android phone using a PC's keyboard — and mouse — so the scrcpy's description fitted the bill. I'm pretty sure this was the first time that I stumbled on this build system.

So to make a long story short, it uses Mason and when compiling from sources the default installation is under /usr/local, but I wanted to install it under /usr/local/stow/scrcpy.

That's all.