komokana VS fish-shell

kanata[1] and komokana[2].

kanata is basically like QMK for any keyboard without the firmware requirement. I use kanata with my trusty old iMac keyboard which is to this day my favourite keyboard of all time. But now I have all the cool QMK-style layers with it.

So that is awesome on its own, but where it gets even better for me, and this is where the seconds have really added up to hours, is that I wrote another piece of software which programmatically changes layers on kanata whenever a different window is focused in my tiling window manager.

This has honestly changed -everything- for me. I no longer have to waste keys on my keyboard to switch layers, I no longer have to -think- about switching layers, I just focus another window with alt+hjkl and whatever keyboard layer I expect for any given application is automatically applied. Definitely one of those "you can never go back" experiences for me.

[1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana

I have an Ergodox EZ sitting collecting dust these days. I got a great deal of use out of it and before long I was compiling my own firmware and making use of various advanced QMK features that were not available through the online visual layer configuration tool.

The keyboard has great build quality, the customer service is great (I got a free replacement for the right half after an issue with one of the keys), the ortholinear layout isn't that difficult to get used to, but ultimately the issue for me was that my hands aren't big enough to use the keyboard comfortably or to type as accurately as I'd like / as I'm used to typing.

I'm now back on my Apple Magic Keyboard and happier than ever, though with a few tweaks and improvements taken from my time using the Ergodox EZ.

I am now using kanata[1] which allows me to have multiple QMK-style layers on my regular old keyboard. This is already a huge step up from my pre-Ergodox days! I also like that I can have my layer configurations version controlled in a plain old git/dotfiles repo.

Since the layers are handled at the software level, I wrote my own integration with kanata, called komokana[2] to switch keyboard layers programmatically based on different state events emitted from my tiling window manager[3].

What that means in practice is that my keyboard can automatically switch to an app-specific layer when that app's window is focused, or to a workspace specific layer, or to a browser tab-specific layer, or really just switch on any event emitted by the window manager or any specific window manager state.

For me, this is really the killer feature of my setup now, and one that I don't think would be anywhere near as easy to implement with QMK which sits at the hardware level.

[1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana

[3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Hello friends! You may know me from my previous posts about my tiling window manager and my automatic keyboard layer switcher (or maybe even my harebrained attempts to get Helix to behave more like Vim!)

With all of these pieces now in place, I am very happy to introduce komokana. an automatic application-aware keyboard layer switcher for Windows.

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512