mpercy

One of the best arguments I've seen on this matter is by Steve Yegge. It's a must read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...

I spent 10 years in industry before I decided to learn to touch type. I noticed how fast some of my colleagues could chat and code and I was embarrassed. Then I read Steve's article. It was tough at first but I can't tell you how much it's helped my productivity.

Also, remap CapsLock to Ctrl on your keyboard. It makes coding a dream. And if you use Vim or a Vim-mode in your IDE, remap the sequence 'jk' to Esc. I never leave the home row anymore. See http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/chapters/10.ht...

ag is incredible, especially paired with Ack.vim and a mapping. I use <leader>as to search for the current word under the cursor. The results are instantaneous. With ag and YouCompleteMe, I never fall back to cscope/ctags in C++ projects anymore.

One thing though, it skips certain source files seemingly arbitrarily without the -t param and I haven't figured out why... Doesn't seem related to any .gitignore entries that I have been able to identify.

I'm not sure where you are looking but the Parquet home page looks mostly brown and reddish to me.

Have you ever tried web browsing on a mac with the trackpad gestures? The efficiency gains are awesome (this is what got me to switch)

Also, it's Unix so if you normally work with Unix/Linux all day, then you get a great terminal environment that works similarly to your server environment. It ships with ssh, rsync, vim, etc etc and you don't have to install cygwin or worry about hitting that stupid backslash key.

That said, a lot of great hackers I know use e.g. a Thinkpad running Linux or Windows. To each their own.

Cool idea. I've done the standup desk thing before at work with a tall chair as a sitting option. I actually ended up using the chair most of the time so I switched back to avoid constantly vaulting up and down, but it was an interesting experiment for about 2 years.

One concern I would have about this particular configuration is the lack of a keyboard tray. Ergonomically, you would want your eyes about level with the top of the monitor or maybe a few inches below the top. At the same time, you want your keyboard to comfortably sit below so that you can keep your elbows at about 105 degrees or so. With the addition of a keyboard tray, and possibly a monitor stand, this can be a really nice long term ergonomic setup.

Found some tips on ergonomics at the link below, and these are inline (no pun intended) with what I have heard from the mandatory ergonomics training at my employer.

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art21940.asp

I like this.

Interesting that (from the MITx FAQ) they will provide the classes free of charge but will charge for certification. Has a thread of similarity to an open-source business model. :)