(Back in the eighties,) I had a teacher who taught both French and geography (I think), and he used the apostrophe as the thousands separator. With a twist. For example, he would write three million as 3'000'000, and then he would abbreviate that to 3''. Very fascinating. I wonder if that was somehow inspired by Swiss conventions.

The mail program has a folder tree on the left, the list of messages in the center, and the current message on the right. The IDE has all these tool windows that need showing, in addition to the actual editor. Websites also like it if the window size is a bit more.

Back when I was using Emacs and xterm, mainly, it was nice to show Emacs in the left half and then two xterms on the right.

So instead of tiling, I've come to realize that I only need a couple of window positions and sizes: Mail program and IDE are full screen. The browser occupies 70% width and height, in the top right corner, and the terminal is in the bottom left corner, 200 columns by 44 rows or so. (Lazygit works better if the terminal is a bit larger.) The chat program is full height, 60% width, left edge.

In this way, while the IDE is building or running tests, I can summon the web browser and still see at the bottom and on the left what is the progress of build or test. Also, when I use the software through the browser, I can see a couple of lines of log messages, which is enough to tell me whether to switch.

So I'm now happy with hotkeys in Hammerspoon that reposition and resize the current window to one of these presets, and to jump to a specific app with a keypress. I use a modal for this.

I dig the idea of having multi-level modals, somehow this idea never occurred to me.

Just an honest opinion of someone who didn’t have skin in the game. Not sure if it helps.

So it works well with M-|, but not so well with M-f, for example.

So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.

I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).

I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.

I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.

It seems with the git command line the way to do it is to switch to main then pull then switch back to my feature branch then rebase.

With lazygit i hit f on the main branch which pulls its changes then i can rebase (r) right away.

I also like to review the diff of each file before staging it. I get a nice list of changed files, i can select one and see the diff in it, then I can stage it.

But I find that if I have to step around more than a handful of times to find the issue then I forget what happened five steps ago. So I teach for print debugging quite often.

If, however, it’s something where I need to examine state at multiple times in the execution, I lose track in my mind of the state I’ve seen before. This is where print debugging shines: I can see how state evolved over time and spot trends.

In emacs the cursor would be somewhere around line 600 instead.

In German it also knows Computer and Tastatur, but I can’t use autocomplete to type Computertastatur.

Actually I just learned I can. Apparently this word is in the dictionary. But there are just so many compound nouns, it’s impossible for them all to be in the dictionary.

To make it work in such a language it has to understand about constructing compound nouns.

I don’t recall whether you could tell inetd not to do that.

I'm also not happy with Solarized because it's so low contrast.

Some programs have Github themes that seem to be okay.

I tried Catppuccin but I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's better than Solarized but still pretty low contrast.

Is there a color scheme I might like that's supported across multiple applications? IntelliJ, iTerm2, lazygit, neovim come to mind.