I use Rust mostly because I am comfortable working with it. It hits a sweet spot of often letting me write in a functional style, at often zero or very low cost. It has a lot of high quality libraries, for almost any purpose. And the language itself comes with great things too. Traits, Option, and Result are all things I miss when working in other languages like Go.
It’s also a memory safe language that is also fast, approachable, and has a ton of good documentation. What’s not to like?
Anything and everything, really.
I wrote an idle inhibitor in Rust, a GUI WiFi connection manager for my wife, an API client for WriteFreely, I contributed to a Wayland compositor (niri), wrote a library & CLI tools to talk to Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards. I wrote the frontend of my personal search engine in Rust too.
But I also built a Tauri application where the backend and the frontend were written in Rust too. No HTML or JavaScript in sight, not in the sources at least.
Professionally, the answer’s the same: if I am allowed to write it in Rust, I will write it in Rust, whether it is a low-level library that talks with hardware, a GUI application, or some web related thingy, or anything inbetween.
Yes, Forgejo has integrated CI/CD. The Forgejo project itself uses it aswell, quite heavily. It is… somewhat compatible with GitHub actions, but not completely, and it will never achieve feature parity. It’s an okay CI/CD system though, not worse than all the rest, and has the advantage over all others that its integration with Forgejo is tighter.
It’s about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there’s a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It’s pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.
So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.
Or one could buy any of the existing pre-built splits. Which might be more expensive, but it does not involve something one very explicitly said they don’t want to do.
I’d rather spend twice as much on a well built keyboard with warranty than trying to solder one together myself and botch it up, and then it suddenly costs more than if I just bought a pre-built one.
https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Adjustable_Keyboard maybe, or https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_G80-5000? Something along those lines?
I use a keyboard with 64 keys (Keyboardio Model 100), with a layout that would likely drive any normal person mad: there are no numbers on the base layer, and all modifiers are on the thumb cluster. My top row is shifted symbols like @*$^%!&. I love it. I can reach every key without moving my hand, which helped tremendously with my RSI. With clever use of layers, one-shot modifiers & layers (where one-shot means that you press and release a modifier, and it remains active for the next keypress only), I have access to every symbol available on a traditional layout and more, without having to move my hand or do weird finger gymnastics.
It’s not a keyboard I’d normally carry (it’s heavy, split, and takes up more space than a traditional full-size one), that’s not why I like it small. I like it small because I don’t need to move my hand to reach all the keys, and that increases my typing comfort a lot. I have no use for a dedicated numpad: I can just press my right palm key and turn that half of my keyboard into a numpad. If I’m typing a single digit, I don’t even need to hold the palm key. If I’m typing a longer number, I can double tap the palm key to toggle the numpad layer on, and tap it a third time once I’m done. I don’t need cursor keys, because I can tap the left palm key to turn the keyboard into navigation mode: the right side controls the text cursor (ie, arrow keys, page up/down, home/end), and the left side controls the mouse. Most of the time, I don’t even need a mouse, because I can control the pointer from the comfort of my keyboard. I do have a trackball placed inbetween the two halves for the rare cases where I require more mousing than what is comfortable with keys, but… that’s not used all that often.
So, in short, the reason I prefer small and split is because they let me type without moving my hand, or stretching my fingers uncomfortably, and I still have convenient access to every symbol I need. I might need to do a bit more “work” to type certain things, but that’s a small price to pay for the comfort I gain by not having to move my hands.
I can write at ~120WPM with this setup (but I normally don’t need to, my normal typing speed is closer to ~60WPM, because my speed is limited by thinking speed, not my typing speed), I write code with this, I write prose in both English and Hungarian, and I even play some games with it! (Most games I play with a controller though, because I can do that from the couch.)
Just because it is small doesn’t mean it can’t do everything a full-sized keyboard can. I just do the same things in a different way, with different compromises. With a full-sized one, if you want to type numbers, you either have to move your hand to the numpad, or use two hands to type something like 1994. I can type that number with one hand, without moving my hand: instead of moving hands, I switch layers. With a full-sized keyboard, if you need Home, End, PageUp, PageDown or the like, you either need to move your hand, or you need whatever program you’re using to have different bindings for the same functionality. I can just press a key to go into navigation mode, and move the cursor whatever way I like, without moving my hands, or finding an alternative binding - works in every program, anywhere - instead of moving hands, I press an extra key. I found that pressing an extra key (especially if I don’t need to hold it) is more comfortable than moving hands. I also found that not moving my hands increased my accuracy, because I don’t need to find the home position when moving my hand back: it never moved in the first place.
In most games, I move with a mousetrackball, controlling everything with one hand didn’t quite work out for me. I do use the thumbstick to navigate menus or the like, and it works well for that. As for the thumb button: I usually bind that to Jump, or to Esc (or whatever other key gets me to the game menu). It really depends on the game how much I use the thumb button.
If I were building a gamepad, I’d build something very close to the Azeron, but probably replace the thumb stick with a D-Pad, or 4 buttons or something along those lines. I’d put those to better use than the thumbstick. And I’d make the thumb button trigger by pressing downwards, rather than out.
Although not a QMK-powered keyboard, perhaps an Azeron device could do the trick? I have an Azeron Classic, and it’s fantastic, friend of mine is very happy with her Azeron Cyborg too. They are built for gaming, they’re comfy, and reasonably customisable too. Comes fully assembled, so you don’t have to build it either.
Yes, you’ll need to move the number layer, to have a higher index than the QWERTY layer. In QMK, layers are index-ordered (see the docs here), no matter the order you activate them. If you activate layer 9 (qwerty) and layer 4 (numpad), then even if you activated layer 4 later, it will still be below layer 9. So any key that is not transparent on 9, will be looked up from 9. Only transparent keys will be looked up from layers below.