Good luck, and let me know how it goes, it should be just that really, just don’t touch the controller until you’re through

That’s weird, that’s the solution, does your controller has some drift that could cause it to still be firing some thrusters?

Obvious spoiler ahead is obvious: Just let go of the controller when you enter that area, you’ll float peacefully (albeit very close to them) until the exit portal.

Honestly, I’m absolutely happy with my Steam Deck, I think it ticks most of your boxes (it even runs Linux, so it’s essentially a portable Linux computer designed for gaming), so I think it’s the better option that you’re looking gor. To your points specifically:

it’s really geared towards family/party gaming

There are plenty of party games on Steam.

it’s Nintendo, so you get the whole usual games (Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.)

This is the only reason to get a switch, if you want a Nintendo console and Nintendo games this is the way. Everyone who gets a switch understand this is the reason they’re getting it. If this is as strong a point to you that it makes you overlook everything else, then get the switch.

like most consoles, it’s plug and play and can be enjoyed in the living room (I kind of gave up trying to set up a proper gaming experience with my Linux PCs, given that I don’t have the hardware for it)

Steam Deck also has a Dock that you can plug to your TV, you’ll need controllers but even so it should be much cheaper in the long run since games are extremely affordable compared to Nintendo.

the battery life is not great to say the least (2.5 hours takes me back of the Game Gear in early 90s!)

Haven’t seen many benchmarks of the switch to be honest, but that does sound bad, the Deck only gets that bad battery life if you’re playing Cyberpunk or something, for more casual games it can get upwards of 6h. Plus you can get power banks that fast large it while playing, which I assume is also possible on the switch although the switch 1 used to have some issues with power banks.

the screen seems to be pretty bad too (at least it’s a step back from the OLED one of the Switch)

All but the cheapest Deck models now use a 90Hz OLED panel

the joycons are still not using a Hall effect sensor, meaning they might still be prone to drifting

While the Deck’s default sticks are not hall effect, they are easily replaceable and Valve sells hall effect replacements on ifixit, so if you ever get drift in your sticks it’s fixable.

most of the games will not be sold as proper cartridges but as download codes

If you’re going down this rote Steam sells download codes for much cheaper

the whole thing (console, additional gamepads, games) is quite pricey

The Deck is about the same price, but like I said you’ll end up saving in games since you start with your whole Steam Library and can get more games much cheaper.

it’s Nintendo, famous for their anti-everything (anti-homebrew, anti-emulation, anti-piracy)

The Deck is by far the most open console you can get, you can even replace the entire OS if you want to, but StramOS is great and you shouldn’t need to.

Both are good games, but they’re very different from each other. Also neither is made by Bethesda.

Trying not to spoil too much, there’s a timer but it doesn’t really matter, you will almost never run out of time and retrying is encouraged. There’s almost no time pressure in this game, and the amount of time in that timer is over 20 minutes, which should be plenty of time to do what you have to, and if not you can reset the timer and try again.

You probably missed one entry that told you they were blind but not deaf

Damn, I thought I had sent the reply and it’s been erased.

I’ll keep it short, muscle memory for qwerty doesn’t go away that easily, at least it didn’t for me, but I’m able to type blindly in qwerty (just not touch typing). Still I think that something I can use in my laptop is very useful so I can keep the ergonomics on the go.

I don’t have the exercises, it was just something someone told me to do, I’m sure whatever your doctor is telling you would be better.

For the split vs ortholinear I think split makes more difference, whenever I use a normal keyboard I feel this, but never had any pains related to it, it’s just more comfortable.

Why not use thefuck which also corrects typos?

• It lacks a d-pad
• It lacks a right thumb stick
• The thumb stick it has is not capacitive nor drift free
• It only has one back paddle for each side
• Ergonomics of the deck are way better, at least for me
• It lacks the ... button (although this is minor because Steam+a opens the same menu)

Don’t get me wrong, the SC 1 is a great controller, but the Steam deck is better, getting a Steam deck like controller would be awesome.

I understand, and I agree, although I’m reading all the replies are already becoming wall of text so I’ll skip parts but I have read them and they’re all interesting.

I’ve landed on Night.

That looks interesting, although I would be weary of learning a layout that only works on specific keyboards, it will make it hard for you to use a laptop on the go, work in an office with a normal keyboard or any other similar situation.

Furthermore, how bad did things become?

I think it’s easier if I answer this first. At the worst I had problems holding heavy stuff in my hand, as in fingers lackesld strength or didn’t respond properly. And for my lower back at the worst it was constant pain where I needed to lay down with a pillow on my lumbar to stretch. After fixing those I became very aware of the initial feelings, such as numbness or feeling pain when stretching (which btw I strongly recommend you check out wrist and finger stretching exercises as they help a lot). Lots of the changes I made (e.g. split ortholinear keyboard) were probably not needed, but the wrist pain that kickstarted everything got me worry enough that I don’t want to take any chances.

After a couple of hours, I do experience strange sensations that border on pain. Furthermore, there’s (almost) always some level of unease/discomfort. Thankfully, resting continues to feel good and I get especially revitalized after sleeping well. But I acknowledge that this isn’t sustainable.

It’s not, those are exactly the early signals that you asked me about, you think that because you’re able to rest and stretch and it goes away that it’s all fine, but it will require ever more stretching and resting until they don’t go away ever. At least that’s what happened to me, at the beginning I would stretch my wrist and fingers and rest for a while and be fine, eventually that became next day I’ll be fine, then over the weekend, then never.

Wrist pain and fingers that feel wacky. So, this is basically carpal tunnel 101.

That’s exactly what I had, although mine was never actually diagnosed, but I had all of the symptoms and my dad had to do the surgery so I have family history. It does get better if you adjust, I don’t feel any of the symptoms I once did, and it is sustainable I haven’t had any symptoms in about 10 years since I switched to a more keyboard centric flow and the layout, so putting in the work does help out. I should say I had 24 years when the symptoms first appeared, so it was kindof young which was one of the reasons I got very scared about getting those symptoms so early.

org-mode seems to be Emacs’ forte.

Org-mode is absolutely wonderful, I haven’t tried any replacement because the reason I abandoned org-mode wasn’t emacs related, I kept using emacs for org-mode for a while after I dropped it as my main editor. The reason is that there’s no compatibility with other editors or apps. Everything uses markdown, and for most basic stuff markdown is good enough. I do miss habit tracking, task management, table calculations and other neat stuff, but the commodity of using the same format for everything and that other people use it as well outweighs all of that for me.

Curious to see this at the very top of your list. Perhaps I should make my switch to Sway rather sooner than later. Thank you for the endorsement!

For me it was a lot off wrist pain, so switching to a more keyboard centric way of interacting with the WM was very impactful.

I intend to learn this with the alt keyboard layout after the more ergonomic split keyboard has arrived. Wish me good luck 😉!

Which alternate layout are you considering? I recommend grabbing something you typed and feeding it here to check heat map of keypresses you would have done to have some visual representation of your usage.

So I suppose that by effectively removing most need for a mouse, the switch to a trackball has been less impactful.

Bingo, I actually switched to trackball before going to keyboard centric WM, but after it I’ve even gone back to mouse a few times feeling almost no difference, because I end up using the mouse a lot less.

Btw, perhaps related, would you happen to be aware of hints? If so, could you touch upon its relevance?

I have, not exactly it but similar stuff, I used to use a browser called conkeror that had emacs key bindings, and have tried to learn a very similar system to hints in the past. Honestly, when I has lots of wrist pain they were useful to completely remove the need of a mouse, but they’re clunky and not as efficient as a pointer so I tend not to use them.

Curious. Is this a special ergonomic chair (or something)?

Nope, just a Secret Lab Titan Evo, but any good chair would do, I spent a year with a cheap Amazon chair and had lots of back pain.

Did you advance/progress in increments because you were testing out the latest addition to the setup? And thus, only introduced a subsequent change after judging that you were not ‘done’ yet?

It was more of a gradual thing, I had wrist pain, so I switched to a trackball, that helped but didn’t got rid of it. So I tried AwesomeWM, found Conkeror and slowly the pain started to fade away and I dove deep into the keyboard centric thing learning touch typing and Colemak. Eventually other issues came on, like pinky strain from Emacs, or a different kind of wrist pain from a small keyboard that made me switch to a split one, or back pain that made me invest in a good chair. I don’t think my setup is “done”, it adapts to whatever my body is asking, but I’ve started to listen carefully and switch stuff on the early signals because that first wrist pain was an eye opener on how bad things can get if you ignore them.

I am so glad to read this! While the journey until I am able to interact with my systems without any pain seems far away right now, success stories like yours make me so pumped to pull through.

Do you feel pain now though? If so what? You should address that immediately. At most points I would have answered that I felt no pain with my setup, because those things build up gradually, if you’re at the point of feeling pain the time to take action is now.

About the emacs plugins, yeah, by the name I can tell you those do the same to the ones I cited, my point is that the plugin ecosystem for it might be a bit less extensive, and not sure how to set shortcuts that use vim key bindings for other plugins.

I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.

Why? Having had an emacs config that I copied from somewhere and ended up growing and becoming something unmanageable, I’m have a very strong opinion that one should build your own config files from scratch to know them. Presets are good if you’re going to be using them bare, but if you’re going to customize them they can get in the way. And that’s another point for Nvim for me, their configs are very easy, I followed this guide and had a working config that I could easily expand in no time.

org-mode FTW

Ah, I miss org-mode, it’s too bad the world went with Markdown instead.

Granted, I’m still very much enjoying Emacs. But, I shouldn’t disregard/dismiss Neovim any longer. It’s time to revisit this rabbit hole 😂.

Meh, maybe, maybe not, Emacs is great, I just never would have gone with evil mode, it sort of feels like it defeats the purpose of both emacs and vim in my mind for some reason. It’s like if someone told you they put a Ford engine on their Chevrolet, it feels convoluted and strange to think on that solution before thinking of using a Ford.

No, there are other ways to get access to your machine without needing it. In general you can classify vulnerabilities as either code execution or privilege escalation, a code execution vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on your machine, a privilege escalation allows him to break barriers that you might have imposed on him.

For example, if you’re running service X as root, and someone manages to find a way to use something on service X to execute code, they might get a reverse shell to your box and run anything there. So you might set service X to run as your user instead of root, now that vulnerability is less important because it only compromises your user, but the attacker could use this one in conjunction with the other one to gain control of your user, then escalate to become root.

If this is something you’re interested in, there’s a cool website called hackthebox where you have to do these sort of things for real. If you want to have an idea on how it looks, there are some excellent videos here showing walkthroughs for many of them he boxes, I recommend checking something labeled easy since these boxes can get quite complex, but it will give you a good idea of the steps attackers need to take to compromise your system

Came here for the wallpaper, saved this reply for the link. I had considered running my own server a while back to be able to play again.

Hey, yeah, I know the feeling, every time I lose an already typed reply I completely lose motivation to rewrite it.

Yeah, my pinky strain issue is completely gone, I also used to have some more pain on my wrist which made me go through a very similar journey to you, I took many steps for it to the point where nowadays my setup is (in order of what I think has made the largest impact)

• Using i3/sway as my WM for a keyboard centric usage
• Switching to Colemak and learning touch typing properly
• Split ortholineal keyboard (crkbd)
• Trackball instead of mouse

I’ve also got a height adjustable desk and a good chair to prevent issues with my back, and my monitors use an arm to be in the right position. It was a slow process of making one change here, few months later another z etc, but this has been my setup for a few years and all of my pains in wrist, lower back, neck, etc have disappeared. I figured if I’m going to ve sitting in front of a computer typing stuff for 8h a day I need to make that as comfortable as possible to be able to do it for longer.

As for emacs with evil mode I was sure that ci" would work, that’s basic vim functionality, what I’m less sure would work is more complex stuff for which I use plugins, e.g. <space>srq" (Surround Replace Quotes with ") to replace the next quotes for " (e.g. changing var = 'some text' to var = "some text"). That same plugin allows me to also do <space>srb[ to Surround Replace Bracket/Braces with [ (to change the surrounding [, (, or { to [ ). Another plugin allows me to move to any part of the screen in 4 keystrokes, I press s the two characters of where I want to move, and a third disambiguation character and the cursor moves there. Those are advanced usages that I think will be difficult to reproduce in emacs, plus plugins will not incorporate the basic ideas for movements.

May I ask why emacs in evil-mode instead of Nvim?

Yes, evil-mode would have bridged the gap, however I didn’t go emacs -> vim in one step, I left emacs back in 2017 because of pinky strain, and other ergonomic issues that made me switch keyboard layout as well (which made me lose lots of agility on emacs) and started using Pycharm for python dev, VSCode for other languages (including Markdown for note taking) and nano for system file edition. I tried some of the other suggestions here like atom, sublime, Kate, etc, but they never became my everything tool like emacs used to be. Very recently I discovered Helix, and I gave it a try and loved it, however the lack of plugin support made me have reservations on diving in. But the interaction mode is very close to vim, so I decided to give vim another go and went through a few tutorials on how to set Nvim up while refreshing muscle memory for vim movements and learning new stuff and it’s slowly becoming the everything tool that emacs once was for me.

All of that being said, I don’t think I would use evil-mode on Emacs, the reason is that vim is made with those motions from the ground up, whereas in emacs they will be an after-thought so it will probably not be integrated enough (or more likely will require lots of configurations).

I wasn’t able to see for myself how cin" worked within Vim*.

It’s simple, imagine you have a line of code like so:

my_var = "some string with spaces"

If your cursor is almost anywhere on that line pressing ci" will erase the contents of inside the string and place you in insert mode, i.e. the line will look line this:

my_var = "|"

With | being the cursor in insert mode. There are other similar things, for example ca" (Change Around ") will also erase the quotes, very useful for example to change a hard coded string with a variable.

If you had started with that people would have told you that nothing comes even close. The closest things you will find are Atom (archived), Sublime (closed source) and Helix (still very new and no plugin support, but something to keep an eye on).

Speaking of obsidian, the reason why it took me forever to start using Silverbullet is that Emacs has org-mode which does most of what Silverbullet/Obsidian do out of the box, plus some other stuff that they don’t do (e.g. excel like tables).

But I wanted something I could edit remotely through my phone and web interfaces are better than using text editors over ssh connections. Also I have migrated from Emacs to Nvim, the reasons are purely ergonomical (pinky fatigue is a real issue) but after switching I found a jump in the way to think about an editor. Emacs is great, don’t get me wrong, and if you decide to learn Emacs I can assure you it will be the best editor you’ve used, but it still edits things at a character level, while there are concepts for matching brackets or quotes changing the text inside quotes in Emacs is very character oriented, I.e. go to start of quote, start marking, move to matching quote, delete, whereas in vim is sort of a higher level language where you say Change Inside Next Quote using cin", and expanded with some plugins you can even do srnq' to Surround Replace Next Quote with ’ (which will change the quotations on the next text from whatever to '). And that’s a lot closer to the way I think so it skips a mental step (plus it’s a lot less keystrokes and no Ctrl for my pinky).

But those are the reasons why I switched, many people use Emacs for decades without ergonomic issues, whichever of the two you decide to learn you’ll understand why they’re the staple editors for most people who actually choose an editor.

Others have given you many options, but I would like to know why Nvim or Emacs are not good options for you?