Clojurians Log v2

I loved the discussion about the keyboard - I'm pretty far down the rabbit hole as far as keyboard customization goes and it was great to hear a great pragmatic view of custom keyboards. Inspired me to get started back into my next step of customization, so thanks!

I've been trying to get things pretty minimal but I have never thought of trying to move enter/backspace and things like that off the main layer so there's an extra thing to try.

I haven’t listened yet, but in recent years I’ve gone from a customizer to being a firm believer in minimal customization in all areas of development. So many developers become so locked into their keyboard or their monitor setup or their keybindings that they are completely unable to function in any other environment. My feeling is that going down that road made me a worse developer overall.

I've found the opposite, but I think it's partially because of my constraints - I started due to RSI that was threatening my ability to type. I've also been customizing specifically with a goal to have the best Clojure development experience I can get, so I've been using the ongoing customization as a vehicle for better understanding Clojure as well (which is fun but really not a good way to do it quickly). I now regularly work on both my hyper-customized layout and QWERTY (back and forth) on Windows, Mac and Linux, doing both programming and IT administrative work. I'm functional on all of them though some are a bit more streamlined than the others. The biggest thing that made it doable is a keyboard that allows me to customize things right on the hardware , and a huge amount of effort. I'm probably going on 3 years since I first started to explore things and have spent a stupid amount of time on it - but since the alternative was potentially not being able to program anymore it's been really, really worth it.

Having a split keyboard has also been really helpful - it's kind of like playing 2 different instruments. Using QWERTY on my split keyboard is brutal but I have no problem on a normal keyboard. One of the things I've discovered after so many iterations is that if I change 1 or 2 things at a time I can be back up to speed within a few days (depending on what it was that changed), so it's been possible to make small adjustments without going back to square one. The more I've done it the better I've gotten at adjusting to the changes, so it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.