December 22, 2015 — keyboard habits

'(No More Holding Down Keys)

Audience: button holders

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” ― Samuel Johnson

I’m trying an experiment where I’ve turned my keyboard repeat rate way down. This should force me to never hold down a key for repetition, but rather use a prefix like 4w (vim) or Ctrl-Backspace (browsers). I’m learning some interesting things!

This is done easily across X with:

#              msdelay rate
#exec xset r rate 250    60    # super fast keyboard cursor delay and rate!
exec xset r rate 250    2     # super slow (vim training)

More details here.

That line is from my ~/.i3/config. Remove the exec to put in in ~/.xinitrc or the CLI.

Other Experiments

  • Reverse your :; key

  • Turn on your awful beep