Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasahle | Hacker News Reader

Reading this article on a Pixel C right now.

I can't say I haven't noticed a few of the lags and keyboard glitches mentioned, but probably not more than a handfull over a month. The Pixel C has nearly replaced my Mac Book Pro 2015 for all of my browsing, note taking and communication.

The keyboard is really good and with apps like Termux, I've also done quite a bit of coding in vim. I'm hoping it'll get split screen soon though.

Feel free to ask any questions.

View on HN

How on earth are you coding in Vim on a keyboard with no escape key, no [], |\, or {} keys, and a misplaced +/= key?

That's my main gripe about that keyboard - no ESC key.

You could do CTRL-[, but I don't see the [ available on there either (at least obviously).

One of my main reasons for a keyboard on an Android tablet is to be able to access remote SSH sessions, edit files if necessary (vi, etc) and so forth.

ESC is just the ... button, at your right thumb, and 1 at your left ring finger. It's quite comfortable to type, though, if using vim a lot, you will probably remap it to space.

Aha. Found this via a search:

For navigating Android

Home — Search + Enter

Back — Search + Backspace

Recent apps — Alt + Tab (same as it ever was)

Missing symbols

Brackets — Use three dots + o for left bracket [, three dots + p for right bracket ]

Back slash — Three dots + equals =

Escape — When would you use this? We don't know. But it lives at three dots + 1

Escape actually works very well across android, for things like closing menus, notification bars and other pop-ups.

It has []|\{} keys. You just have to use the modifyer key right of the space bar. I'm used to changing keyboard layout between languages and platforms, so my muscle memory got used to that quite quickly.

The Pixel C actually has quite a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts: https://support.google.com/pixel/answer/6326992?hl=en&ref_to...

Custom keybindings I assume?

You could remap jk to escape. I think the other keys are merely misplaced.

When I was using an android tablet, I used hacker keyboard for my terminal sessions, because it can be set up to give a pretty full keyboard, including function keys.

In related news though I'm mystified at macbook popularity with developers. The first thing I noticed was the lack of page keys, home/end and delete.

Well I actually run Linux now on my MBP but to demystify, I don't use any of those keys because I only work in vi. You can do those things without the buttons when not in insert mode: page up/down: ctrl f/b home/end: 0/$ delete: x

Although that's somewhat of a simplification for delete.

Well, these are just Fn + Arrow keys. The end/home thing can get a little annoying when programming, but you quickly work your way arround it, and it surely isn't a problem in vim.

Do programmers actually use those keys? I use Home and End in the web browser... but when coding, I just use the close-to-my-fingers shortcuts. Home = C-<, End = C->, Delete = C-d, Page Up = C-v, Page Down = M-v.

It depends on your text editor! I, for one, use C-a for home and C-e for end.

Ah, that's what Home and End do? Different from the browser. Like I said, I never use them for programming.

I have CMD+arrow keys for that, and those key combinations are often easier to reach that home/end/pgdn/pgup on many keyboards.

Haven't really needed a separate delete/backspace key. About the only time I use the separate delete key even on windows/linux is in the file explorer.

I wonder how coders can work on any 15 inch laptop in the first place.

You can display 80 columns on a MUCH smaller screen than that. I wonder how anyone puts up with carting around a laptop bigger than 13 inch.

Speaking as a developer who uses a macbook, I kinda agree. Overall, keyboard support on OSX is way inferior to Windows (and, presumably, Linux - it's been a while). Not only do you have to learn really awkward combos for pagedown, end, etc. but each app interprets them slightly differently (or not at all), so it's not even worth the effort. If it weren't for the unixy innards, I would probably move away.

Home/End: ⌘+Arrows

Page: Fn+Arrows

Delete: Fn+Backspace

The other reasons would be mostly OS X's arguably smoother and overall consistent GUI and its extensibility (through Automator, scripts, globally modifiable shortcuts and the like) and its Unix'ity.

Indeed, you're probably better off with Klaus Weidner's "Hacker's Keyboard" than a bad physical one.

So how do you like Termux? I'm trying to find a good terminal for android. I live in the terminal on my laptop and would love to just get rid of it, and move to a tablet. All the terminal's I've tried are really janky though.

All the other terminals I've tried seemed lagging or incomplete. Like they only supported certain programs or ran in a box rather than on the file system.

With Termux I was quickly able to grab everything I needed with the package manager. It certainly didn't feel laggy at any time. (Yet)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com