Vim Anti-Patterns - <AUTHOR> https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-anti-patterns/ <comment><USER2> I never got into the habit of using { and }. I just use H M L (high/medium/low) to get approximately in the right part of the screen, then go line-by-line. You can also do 5H or 10L to get "5 lines from the top" or "10 lines from the bottom". I make pretty good use of vim features, but I like to mix some sloppiness with the precision. I don't often count things before typing commands, because that breaks the second-nature quality of navigation. If something is more than 2 or 3 objects away, I approximate. I do use counting with t, T, f, and F a lot to hop around, including things like c2f). Very frequently that combines well with spamming j.j.j.j.j. I use . with trivial movement (like j or n) at least 10x more than @a. Another way to move fast sloppily is W and B. I guess I'm saying: learn all the cool stuff you can do, but don't feel like you have to find the most precise way to do every little thing. If you're just starting out, relax and don't try too hard. You can always just pick one new thing every couple weeks and try to add it to your habits.

Oh also: he mentions O to insert above the current line. I use that a lot, but on my systems (going back 15 years or so I think) it has always required a pause, like vim is waiting to see if I'm typing O or some longer command. If I type O and immediately start entering text, strange things happen. This doesn't happen with o. Does anyone else experience this? Maybe it's just something weird in my own setup.

EDIT: Some more "moving fast sloppily": 1G goes to the top of the file. G goes to the bottom. Also you can not-move, but scroll the visible area so that your cursor is on the top line (zENTER), middle line (z.), or bottom line (z-). I use that a lot when I am Ctrl-Fing through a file, so I can see more context.

<comment><USER3> I have two tricks for better movement, add the following to your .vimrc:

        " for scrolling up and down quickly
        nnoremap J 7j
        nnoremap K 7k
        vnoremap J 7j
        vnoremap K 7k

and the second (which requires a third party plugin):

        " easymotion allows us to jump to all places that could have been reached by
        " (w in this case), and the bd- indicates we want to search backwards too.
        nmap f <Plug>(easymotion-bd-w)
        vmap f <Plug>(easymotion-bd-w)

The first one originates from recognizing the problem from the antipatterns article: that spamming j j j j to get down to the line you want is dumb. But I choose not to follow the advice of most vim articles I read which is to learn built-in tricks such as typing 10j or :<line number>. The milliseconds it takes for me to count the number of lines I want to go down or assess the line number of the line I'm interested in aren't worth it, I'll just tap j if the line is close enough or J if it is five or more lines down. I think it is a good solution.

The even better solution (and I use them both in tandem) is to install easymotion [1] and use it like I show in the second example.

I also use gg and G to get to leap to the top and bottom of the file quite a lot.

\---

As to your question about using O to insert above the current line, that should not work that way. Your specific issue sounds very much like a binding has been defined for O<other character>. Type :nmap in vim to display a list of bindings and check for lines starting with O. It might be in your .vimrc or some plugin defined something. I would definitely say remove the binding or the plugin rather than put up with that, O is very useful.

[1] [https://github.com/easymotion/vim- easymotion](https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion)

<comment><USER4> Ahg, no I couldn't do that, I need to keep J as Join lines. That's pretty useful to me. Kinda the inverse of gq.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I bound join lines to :join since I don't use it that often. I still encourage you to try binding something to 7j (or whatever number of j's feels right). One of the best shortcuts of my life.

<comment><USER5> I tried to use J, but it's somewhat tied to my muscle memory already (and I'm surprised I use it quite often joining comments and stuff). If you're like me, remember that you can abbreviate :join to just :j.

The advantage of using J and K is that they're very vim movements, but if can't because of :join, another workaround would be to use <PageUp> and <PageDown> since they're redundantly bounded to <Ctrl-B> and <Ctrl-F>:

        nnoremap <PageDown> 7j
        nnoremap <PageUp> 7k
        vnoremap <PageDown> 7j
        vnoremap <PageUp> 7k

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These are all good tips but most of the anti-patterns seem to skew towards beginners ( _e.g._ don't use the arrow keys, don't navigate in insert mode). One that I think is more common among intermediate, and even advanced, users is the misuse of tabs, windows, and buffers.

A lot of people have a tendency to think of each tab as corresponding to a single open file. This is very understandable because it closely matches the paradigm of most IDEs but it's actually an anti-pattern in VIM. Tabs are really meant to be more like workspaces where you arrange multiple windows into a desired layouts. You then have one buffer for each file that you're dealing with and view them in your windows. It's perfectly fine for multiple windows to share a single buffer or to switch out the buffer that is being viewed in any given window. This StackOverflow answer [1] and this blogpost [2] both go into a fair bit more detail.

If you're trying out this approach for the first time then you probably want to add `set hidden` to your configuration in order to avoid automatically closing buffers that aren't currently being viewed in a window. Coupling this approach with fzf.vim [3] makes managing very large numbers of files a breeze compared to using one tab per file.

[1] - [http://stackoverflow.com/a/26710166](http://stackoverflow.com/a/26710166)

[2] - [http://joshldavis.com/2014/04/05/vim-tab-madness-buffers- vs-...](http://joshldavis.com/2014/04/05/vim-tab-madness-buffers-vs-tabs/)

[3] - [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim)

<comment><USER7> Well, I've been using vi and it's brethren since about 2002 and I've pretty much always used the arrow keys; after some point it becomes muscle memory...

I never really understood what the problem with this was; I rarely actually use them (esc|capslock /str,ctrl+f|b etc) is usually how I move around and if I'm wanting to move a few chars my little finger is not moving very far (at least, on apple keyboards)...

Is this heathen territory? ;)

Do you see any big advantage of using a lot of buffers/tabs/splits over running multiple vims inside tmux? My workflow seems to be more multiple vim's and shells inside tmux (I have ` as my "control key" in tmux, which is right beside z on my keyboard) which always feels quicker to me than ctrl+ww or ctrl+w<arrow>; and I really like the "zoom" functionality there...

hitting `` to switch between windows in tmux is really nice, too.. :}

<comment><USER8> > Do you see any big advantage of using a lot of buffers/tabs/splits over > running multiple vims inside tmux?

I think my personal benefit is that I don't have to make a bunch of new SSH connections every time I want to split files in vim, I can just open up a new buffer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was originally a die hard Emacs user, but I started to feel a bit of strain on the whole holding Ctrl+p, Ctrl+n etc. I was trying to find an editor/plugin that can reduce keystrokes or at least the strain. I ran across EVIL for Emacs which is just a Vim emulation and keybindings for Emacs users. Unfortunately I did not like it at first the entire hjkl felt awkward and all those modes - OMG. But after toying around with it a bit and playing the online interactive vim learning game I started to see the benefits of Modal editing.

I can easily without leaving home row move a few letter to the right or back with hl or f and F. but things started to get a lot more fun when you realize that Vim is a programming editing language and it's beauty is in the commands. This leads to amazing things that I hated before, such as deleting 2 words back from my current position would simple be d3b. instead of shift+ctrl+left arrow x 2 + delete.

Overall it's been about 2 months since I've started using EVIL mode for Emacs and I love it. I'll stand by the saying that Emacs is a great OS and vim is a great for editing text in it's modal editing.

lastly modal mode really felt powerful only after I had re-mapped my CAPS key to ESC. I mean throughout the past decade I don't think I've even used Caps for anything. so I've remapped the machines I work on the have caps as esc.

\- for those that think it's not reasonable to do so and the whole point of using vim is so that you can edit machines via ssh then use vim on that machine, my suggestion is to use tramp in Emacs with ssh or plink to get to the server and edit (you will still have the local caps to esc key mapped)

TL;DR - Vim modal editing is amazing and feels has straining than other editing layouts - IMO.

<comment><USER10> I love vim but admittedly ctrl-backspace-backspace is just as fast as d2b and works in nearly any editor. The stuff i really like is stuff as dt. which will delete until the end of the sentence, ie until the period. Or di( which deletes everything inside the parenthesis.

<comment><USER11> I decided one year that I would force myself (a vi die-hard) to use emacs for everything for an entire year, to see if I ever got used to it. One thing that never stopped driving me crazy was that there's no efficient way to duplicate a line like yyp in vim. The closest I could ever get in emacs was ctrl+k k ctrl+y ctrl+y (that is, delete the line and then paste it back twice). Looking online for a solution leads me to believe that the only way to really effectively use emacs is to learn lisp and reprogram it yourself.

<comment><USER12> ...Which is actually quite simple. Here's my function for doing that that I wrote just now:

      (defun duplicate-line
        (interactive)
        (kill-whole-line)
        (yank)
        (yank))

Five lines, and it took me all of ten minutes to write, including looking up the names of all the functions. Of course, there's probably a better way to do this, but I don't know what it is. Now all you have to do is bind it to a key.

Or, of course, you could just record a keyboard macro to do it instead.

<comment><USER13> I have mine set up like this:

[https://gist.github.com/asummers/7784d40b1bc53ee309777274e9d...](https://gist.github.com/asummers/7784d40b1bc53ee309777274e9d10997)

That way I can hit M-w when I don't have a region and get the copy behavior for the whole line.

<comment><USER12> That's cool. I have no idea how that works, but it's cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug: I wrote a small guide about how I switched to Vim, after having "tried" for years. It's not a universal approach, but maybe it can be useful for people here: [https://github.com/bpierre/switch-to-vim-for- good/blob/maste...](https://github.com/bpierre/switch-to-vim-for- good/blob/master/README.md#switch-to-vim-for-good)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a great resource, but the article is pretty strict on the arrow keys. I would recommend `nnoremap`, over `noremap`, because it only disabled the arrow keys in Normal Mode.

The author's explains his rationale in the next section, it's to prevent users from living in Insert Mode. Fair enough. But, when making several relatively close edits, the ability to tap a few arrow keys in Insert Mode is far easier and less mentally demanding than any key combination that requires the user to bounce around different modes.

<comment><USER16> I don't really disagree with your overall point, the arrows keys are not horrible, but I think for beginners removing all arrow keys is the best approach. I used vim for a while just relying on the arrow keys, and it wasn't until I disabled them completely that I really started to use vim. If I left them on in insert mode, I would have just ended up using them that way, just due to muscle memory.

I'd also add that if you remap Esc to something more manageable, leaving insert mode for a second to move around starts feeling a lot more natural. I still do get where you're coming from, the arrow keys do have a time and place. But since I do all of my moving around in normal mode, leaving insert mode to do it just 'makes sense' now and I really don't even have to think about it.

<comment><USER17> I tried and failed to make myself use `hjkl` instead of the arrow keys. It was a perpetual hindrance to my brain that up (`k`) and down (`j`) did not spatially reinforce their functions.

What ultimately worked was to map the triangle `ijkl` like you normally see `wasd` in games.

         i
        jkl

        i -- up
        k -- down
        j -- left
        l -- right

I then added two more keys beyond left and right to skip forward and back by words.

          i
        hjkl;

        h -- skip backward to the beginning of a word (ordinarily `b`)
        ; -- skip forward to the end of a word (ordinarily `e`)

There were some echo effects since I had to replace `i`, but they were manageable. On machines where I don't have my vimrc available I'm still functional, just clumsy. It was definitely worth it.

My vimrc: [https://github.com/rectang/dotfiles/blob/master/vimextra](https://github.com/rectang/dotfiles/blob/master/vimextra)

<comment><USER18> Oh god... doesn't this mess with plugins or something?

<comment><USER19> Speaking as someone with a similar setup, I've never had many issues with plugins assuming the use of hjkl. The only one I can think of offhand that has issues is indent-object.

The thing that really causes issues is my attempt to swap the roles of [ and {, using [] to jump between paragraphs and {} to do fancy function jumping. Vim plugins really don't like that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While it's unarguably fun, I can't believe the effort required to become actually good at vim (as opposed to just using a few of the easier features) will ever pay itself off. (These days, at least - if you spend your days editing code in a terminal over a dialup connection, then it's absolutely worth it!)

Maybe there are scenarios where the busywork of text editing really is on your critical path, but even as a fluent coder who uses some verbose languages at times (my current project is C++ and IEC Structured Text, does it get any more blabby?) I still spend far more of my time looking at, and thinking about, code than I do actually typing. Any extraneous cognitive load just takes focus away from what I'm actually meant to be doing.

<comment><USER21> Did you take the time to learn vim? Just start using it. With only a small subset of commands you can be pretty damn efficient. The fact that you can compose actions means that you don't need to remember every command - you can just create them yourself. After a very short while you will "get" it. You can say to yourself "I want to change the next three words" and immediately do it by pressing "c3w". Or you can move around with your mouse. The former is much faster.

BTW, I rarely use escape. I am using Spacemacs with evil-mode, and the default "fd" is perfect for me. It's much faster than using ESC.

<comment><USER20> Oh, I've been using it for years and I'd consider myself an adequate vim user. I'm quite comfortable in it, just using the basics - but given the small amount of time I spend using it these days, the added investment to learn the more seems redundant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _" If you have to move more than a couple of lines, moving one line at a > time by holding down j or k is inefficient."_

This very point is actually why I moved from Vim to Emacs years ago. After mastering Vim, I realized that Vim strongly encourages you to think a little too much about exactly how to get there or do that thing in the fewest keystrokes, and that it's incompatible with muscle memory. Even years later, I still had to think too much about it. Whereas in Emacs I can just use basic character/word/line-based movements and let my muscle memory do its thing while I let my brain focus on the code itself instead of how to use the text editor.

<comment><USER23> Honest question: How does Emacs help with this particular problem ?

I feel like with every editor, it involves repeatedly hitting J, Ctrl+N or down arrow, which is inefficient. Do you have a way to get to a particular line that does not force you to think too much about how to get there ?

<comment><USER22> > _How does Emacs help with this particular problem?_

What, inefficiency? Inefficiency wasn't the problem. The problem was having to focus too much of my mind on how to use the editor. Muscle memory is invaluable, and Vim just doesn't let my muscle memory take over if I keep having to think about what's the most "efficient" way to move around or change text. Emacs lets my muscle memory take over easily. I just hit C-n or M-S-] a lot. It's inefficient, sure. But who cares? I never realize I'm doing it, and I never feel blocked having to wait until I get to the line I want to.

<comment><USER24> Normal vim users aren't thinking about the most efficient way to perform an edit, but rather just go with muscle memory. Said vim users also don't write blog articles on how to be more efficient with vim.

<comment><USER22> Well after 5 years of using Vim, the muscle memory for more efficient operations never kicked in. I was either holding "h" and "l" to move around, or I was consciously thinking of the more efficient combined operations like "f.ce.com^[". And that conscious thinking was _very_ distracting from the actual code I was editing.

<comment><USER25> I used vim for everyday use for almost ten years before I realized that navigating around with the keyboard would never be as good as clicking a mouse. All the mental overhead of trying to be efficient with vim, for me at least, ended up being a bit of a false oasis.

I happily switched to Sublime for two years and then VS Code. I still use emacs with Clojure though.

<comment><USER22> Similar story here. I use IntelliJ for Java and Emacs for Clojure. We're porting our codebase from Clojure to Java at work, so soon it'll all be IntelliJ, which will be pretty sweet. I do kinda miss Paredit, but IntelliJ makes up for it with lots of other pretty sweet features.

<comment><USER26> Out of interest did you try using the Vim plugins for Clojure?

I'm only playing, but found a good set-up with vim-fireplace; vim-clojure- highlight; vim-sexp; Vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people; vim-surround and luochen1990/rainbow

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not trying to start a flame war here, but I in recent few years I am seeing Vim being more popular, and I feel it adoption in terms of younger developers (those who weren't programming when original Vi was around) grows. (Ok, please forget about GUI editors, they have their audience, and I am not comparing any of those facts to them) I used Vim for 3 years, and found philosophy and implementation of modal editing amazing. Writing and manipulating code in it went like bread and butter.

But then I told myself, hey, why not try Emacs? So I've been using Emacs for ~6months now and cannot but notice that community is much more niche and humble compared to Vim. Just look at the sheer number of color schemes available for both editors. And I had to agree, Vim was far superior text editor, but that wasn't enough to keep me away from Emacs, since I gave the advantage to other things (everything else) that Emacs does better.

I tried EVIL mode, and it is amazing, but something just felt wrong using it inside Emacs. I wasn't using either Emacs or Vim. I would often shuffle and mix commands, sometimes I would do :w, sometimes C-x C-s. So I decided to ditch Evil until I get more comfortable with Emacs key bindings. I came to Emacs because of Lisp (and general FP audience is much, much, more based around Emacs, makes sense), amazing tools and plugins which I found more stable, better designed, and it is weird to say this but things just worked with Emacs, things like auto-completion and code navigation (ivy, ace-jump- mode) were really fast, hustle free experiences. Disclaimer, I have never touched older versions of Emacs, spent my time in 24, and now in 25, so many of _myths_ and problems that Emacs got known for over the time, I think, aren't there anymore.

And to sum things up, what is really weird to me is that functional programming is on the rise and every year I see it more and more being adopted, but that doesn't help Emacs audience grow. (Maybe because I am young, and I am nerd often found in nerd communities where things like FP are often praised, but in the real world considered a bit awkward or esoteric.) I showed up at the FP workshop few weeks before in local dev/hacker community place, everybody rocking Sublime Text/Vim, but nobody used Emacs, people were looking at me like I was an Alien. Spacemacs is doing good job at attracting people, but maybe Emacs will stay that programmers/nerd phenomenon, the all-mighty lisp OS, that in the end people often reject or overlook. And why is it like so? I do not know. If somebody can sink into and learn Vim, I don't see a reason why it is different story with Emacs.

<comment><USER12> Emacs was far easier for me than Vim was. To this day, I have no idea how people learn Vim. And the scripting is awful, especially compared to Emacs, which is really a script interpreter that has a built in text-editor script and some useful primitives for text editing.

<comment><USER28> Best of both worlds: [http://spacemacs.org/](http://spacemacs.org/)

Modal editing is far superior, once you learn it.

Emacs runtime and configurability thanks to Elisp is far superior to VimL.

So just use Spacemacs. ^^

<comment><USER29> It works until one wants to create their own configuration stuff and functions and stuff. Much rather just stick with normal emacs configs and stuff and put in EVIL-mode once my pinky finger can no longer reach Ctrl (Not a worry seeing as I need Ctrl for gaming as well).

Also, installing plugins requires one to create one's own layer? Eww.

<comment><USER28> It's complicated, true.

But it does a lot of work for you.

I started to create my own setup from scratch with Evil etc.

But recreating all that Spacemacs has, especially with customizing all the plugins for Vim keybindings, is countless hours of work.

You can skip the layers and side-install custom plugins quite easily though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Useful stuff. I'd add typing J to move the next line to the end of the current line. A move I normally do by being on the next line and then type 0dwiBackspace.

Only just figured that one out by mistakingly having the capslock on when moving around.

<comment><USER31> That's how I discovered "K". Which is usually not what I want, and tends to provoke a moment of "where did this garbage come from and where did my code go?" panic. I'm close to masking it out, but I remap very reluctantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > It's always useful to jump back to where you were, as well, which is easily > enough done with two backticks, or gi to go to the last place you inserted > text. I

And here I was undoing and redoing the entire time.

<comment><USER33> Ha, I do the same - you always learn something new in vim.

For me the biggest boost in Vim was configuring the shell (i.e. readline via .inputrc) to use my vim key bindings, so I can use it without arrow keys. Not because of efficiency, but more for wrists comfort.

Furthermore I am in the camp of mapping ESC to 'jj'. My index finger has more power and using the pinky (e.g. via CAPS or ESC) is too exhausting for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For anyone who wants to build muscle memory in Vim I'm writing 10 Minute Vim, a book of pre-made exercises for practising advanced macros, RegEx, and navigation. It's already helped me learn a number of new commands in just a short time.

[https://leanpub.com/deliberatevim](https://leanpub.com/deliberatevim)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is good solid advice -- I have a problem with vim advice that golfs more unusual circumstances to save a keystroke or extensively remaps the keys. (Generally the only thing I remap is F1 to ESC, because I use laptops that place them inconveniently close together.) Devoting too many cognitive resources to text entry is also an anti-pattern!

<comment><USER18> I highly recommend not using the Esc key, remap to jk or caps lock that you can reach without moving your hands. It makes a pretty big difference.

<comment><USER35> Even easier to use the default Ctrl + [ instead of ESC.

<comment><USER36> I've somehow gotten in the habit of using ^C for Escape. Guess it feels natural from using it in Bash to restart typing my command or to kill a program.

<comment><USER35> Related: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5030164/whats-the- differe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5030164/whats-the-difference- between-ctrlc-and-ctrl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Note that d2wi and c2w are not exactly equivalent: d2w will consume trailing whitespace after the second word, while c2w will not. FAFAIK, there is no exact equivalent of d2wi using c. I usually end up using c2aw, but that will also consume any word characters preceding the cursor (not a problem for me since I usually navigate using b and w).

<comment><USER38> > d2wi and c2w

There is a nice chart on this page with a few more inferior/superior motion commands:

[http://vimcasts.org/episodes/modal-editing-undo-redo-and- rep...](http://vimcasts.org/episodes/modal-editing-undo-redo-and-repeat/)

One problem I commonly see with most vim advice articles is they just have too many tips for the reader to consume at once. But if you just make sure to pick up at least one of the tips, you'll at least gain something.

<comment><USER39> Indeed. I try to come back to pages like this every few weeks, and to start training myself to use one more of the tips from it. Today it's * and # to go to the next/previous instance of the word under the cursor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Hitting Escape is usually unnecessary; Ctrl+[ is a lot closer, and more comfortable."

I agree with a lot of the things in this article, but wow, I could not possibly disagree with this quote more. Ctrl+[ is _WAY_ more uncomfortable than using the Escape key.

Granted, I have _many_ years of vim usage that have made hitting Escape a habit, and that probably plays a big part in it, but Ctrl+[ is downright painful for me (and yes, I sat and tried it for a while in vim to see what it would be like).

I can get from the home row to Escape and back with very little effort, though I understand that is not the case for many people. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I use my ring finger to hit Escape rather than my pinky (which would be a lot more work, I think).

<comment><USER41> I suggest remapping Caps Lock to CTRL if you haven't remapped it already.

<comment><USER42> Plug for Karabiner on OS X, which lets you use capslock as a control if you press it with another key, and escape if its released on its own. It has ruined me for other computers that don't have this set up. There's also a way to do it under Linux, but I can't remember what the package is that lets you do that.

<comment><USER43> You're thinking about xcape: [https://github.com/alols/xcape](https://github.com/alols/xcape).

FYI, Karabiner is incompatible with MacOS Sierra. There's a project (Karabiner-Elements) to replace its (and Seil's) functionality, but I don't believe it has feature parity yet: [https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner- Elements](https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements)

<comment><USER42> Wow thanks for the heads up... that would have been a shitty thing to discover the hard way!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'll just drop my 2 cents here as a vim user. I've tried emacs a number of times, but I've gotten too familiar with what vim has on offer.

I think where vim often wins over emacs is the 110 vi modes that every IDE eventually gets. Vi is an idea that can prosper in many environments.

Emacs is kinda like smalltalk. To get much benefit from it, you have to buy into it whole hog, or not at all. I can write C# in VS with vim keybindings, go in sublime text, and then just hack on a Lua snippet in vim itself. Emacs has ways to work with all those, but that requires a new skill set that I don't need at the moment. Maybe after I graduate from college, but right now isn't the time for me.

</comment><comment><USER45> While these tips are good per se, in retrospect I don't think it's that a good idea to tie your muscle memory that much to a single piece of software. I'd say enjoy the cursor keys. Moving around in insert mode is ok too.

<comment><USER46> This is normally true, except that in order to be good at your job as a developer, you have to be good with your tools.

It helps that vim is installed by default in every modern OS.

<comment><USER47> But in reality you'd constrain yourself to using Vim just because it is the lowest common denominator (i.e. it is available - vi - in Sun OS 5.2 & co).

Otherwise, if it's a really modern OS, there's a plethora of modern, fast, cross-platform editors that follow CUA conventions.

<comment><USER48> Right, but a common characteristic of modern editors and IDEs is that they attempt to be uncontroversial and follow the 'intuitive' keybindings because they're what people are used to from word processors.

These editors have sparked a holy war and a cult following not just because they're powerful, but because they're opinionated. They prefer efficiency and customization over familiarity.

I will freely admit that there's only only so many of those programs that I can handle in my life, but my text editor is one so frequently used that it's worth the investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Instead of

      c2w

I prefer

      v2ec

selecting with v helps me avoid making mistakes.

<comment><USER50> ct" or even ci" (or ci) ci] etc) is really useful to reset the inner contents of text delimited by ")] etc.. I use these a lot - [http://fuckyeahvim.tumblr.com/image/122372862496](http://fuckyeahvim.tumblr.com/image/122372862496)

<comment><USER51> ci", ci), ci]... I love these, and use them all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I find that marking my place with "ma" and returning to it with "'a" is a huge productivity boost. Of course the "a" is just a label, you can use any character (this allows multiple marks as well).

<comment><USER9> if you only browse code use gi, that saves me a ton of time. gi brings you back to last inserted text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> So I have used ST3 for years now, and I realise that I'm slowly moving toward Vim. I started using Vim shortcuts in Chrome, and now I use Vintageous in ST3. Vintageous is good, but it is incomplete. It can't even do the first examples on this article (ctrl+f / ctrl+b) correctly.

Thinking I should just bite the bullet. Would mean I could work on a server using Mosh + Tmux as well, which should be rather nice.

What would the current canonical guide be for getting up and running with Vim, with plugins, auto-complete[1], inline linting, multiple carets etc?

[1] Just the ST3-style of parsing out tokens in the same file

<comment><USER18> Note sure about a guide but I would start without any plugins at first. Otherwise you never learn what's vim and what's a plugin, and working on remote servers will be a pain. Also for a lot of plugins, there's a better way of doing things in native vim if you learn it properly.

What worked for me to bite the bullet at uni was making myself do an entire programming assignment in vim and not opening in any other editor. If you commit it doesn't take that long to learn. Keep a list of commands handy and learn a few new ones each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I can recommend vim-hardtime [0] for anyone wanting to force themselves to learn the "vim-way" of navigating. It disables n subsequent presses of hjkl where n is any number you want.

For me I set it up to not allow more than 2 steps in any given direction to remind me to use jumps instead.

[0]: [https://github.com/takac/vim-hardtime](https://github.com/takac/vim- hardtime)

</comment><comment><USER55> <C-c> works likes escape almost all the time. Mapping the caps lock key to Ctrl makes hitting <C-c> super easy. I usually use that instead of escape.

In general I would agree 1 character at a time is an anti-pattern but it needs to be balanced with the cognitive load of counting how many words or deciding what is or is not a boundary when there are symbol characters.

<comment><USER56> This is why `f` is really my workhorse key in vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Movement is an important part of vim, but so is auto-competing. Probably the biggest thing that helped me greatly improve speed in vim was learning the C-x keys and that they are context aware. Having to repeat an entire or similar line/s becomes quick without having to go back to that place. Why move in the file when vim can find the text for you?

<comment><USER40> Pretty funny. I found myself asking "What does C-x do when autocompleting?" I took the 'x' literally, instead of realizing you meant C-n, C-p.

xD

<comment><USER4> In insert mode, C-x actually lists the different completion methods, so it's actually accurate.

^X mode (^]^D^E^F^I^K^L^N^O^Ps^U^V^Y)

I really like having C-x C-f, which autocompletes file names.

<comment><USER40> yeah, see my reply to the parent below. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > If you happen to know precisely where you want to go, navigating by > searching is the way to go, searching forward with / and backward with ?.

It's worth noting that, after searching with ?, you can still move back and forth through occurrences using N and n, in the same way you would after using / for a search.

</comment><comment><USER59> While I prefer vim for text-mode editing, it is so frustrating that it just has to use its own damn keyboard shortcuts and that the ones burned into muscle memory from 20+ years of using pretty much every text editor under the Windows/DOS sun don't work without significant hacking.

</comment><comment><USER60> My favorite is mapping '()' to 'vi)', '[]' to 'vi]', '{}' to 'vi}'. So I can read is as "grab parentheses" instead of "visual inside parentheses"

</comment><comment><USER61> > don't forget you can yank, delete or change forward or backward to a search > result.

Did not know this! (although I've been on vim for ~a month) That's a great trick. Much easier than trying to count words.

<comment><USER2> I agree it is very nice, although you should know one caveat:

deleting/yanking with / and ? will do whole lines, so it may go past the match.

deleting/yanking with t, T, f, and F will go up to just the char you want, but it won't search onto the next line.

I wish there was a way to get a char-by-char multiline search, so I could e.g. cut/yank a whole sentence (something like d/.). But I haven't found it. I wonder if anyone else knows of a way?

<comment><USER62> You might find vim-sneak useful: [https://github.com/justinmk/vim- sneak](https://github.com/justinmk/vim-sneak).

[https://github.com/easymotion/vim- easymotion](https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion) is another plugin that does something slightly different, but also useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Page loads very slow and uses Wordpress. In case it goes down: [http://archive.is/JaOXd](http://archive.is/JaOXd)

</comment><comment><USER64> My eyes. Good content, but very hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER65> I have a programmable keyboard, so I just map escape to be right above tab, where tilde usually is.

<comment><USER66> I use Karabiner + Seil to make my Macbook Pro's Caps Lock be Escape when hit by itself and Control when hit with another key. Unfortunately this doesn't work on Sierra yet so still on El Cap.

<comment><USER67> the lack of tilde doesn't drive you mad?

This is built-into my Lenovo Carbon X1 (gen2) keyboard, drives me bananas as I use tilde quite a bit (being home on linux): [http://www.lenovo.com/images/gallery/1060x596/lenovo- laptop-...](http://www.lenovo.com/images/gallery/1060x596/lenovo-laptop- thinkpad-x1-carbon-2-keyboard-3.jpg)

What kills me more though is that "Shift" is now caps-lock if you double hit it (because home/end are where capslock normally is). The standard way I wake up a machine when it's locked/asleep/blanked? Tapping the left shift key a few times. ergh.

Should get a gen3, they reverted to a more sane keyboard layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is a really good guide.

</comment><comment><USER68> I started off using Emacs a lot (like tons and tons of Emacs with tons and tons of custom modes, functions, and craziness - network pong anybody?). For almost a summer, my xinitrc at the school labs literally opeed up a full screen Emacs; it was my window manager too.

The simplicity of vim (and pretty colors) drew me in. Plus as I learned more sed/ed, I understood vi more. That, and a slow connection from off campus really sucks. I learned that too pretty well. Well enough to hack together some vim scripts, but nothing near my Emacs level. I feel like vim mode hacking is a beast you need to be specially equipped to handle (and I can write APL in any language so it isn't the syntax).

Then Eclipse and IntelliJ came around and I only really used vim for quick one off stuff (if I didn't use printf, echo, or cat). The only time I used vim was for C/C++ or something esoteric, like KDB+/Q/K, that didn't have their own dev environment (unlike say VHDL or Matlab where I could sit in their ugly cocoons).

Now I'm growing tired of the very buggy, slow Java environments that seem to require a gaming rig to compile HelloWorld.java (or sorry, HelloWorld.xml with SpringBoot). And I see all these poor Emacs clones playing catchup with 2000. You have editors written in JavaScript inside a web browser with modules transpiled to JavaScript (for some reason JavaScript is too low-level to write text editing packages in now -- God help us all). That, and they don't support a tenth (I'm being generous) of the functionality that Emacs does and they probably never will.

What is so hard about an extensible text editor? Just getting the basic hooks down for self-insert and movement without having to go to swap?

I remember when Emacs was called "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping". I now see Atom routinely take up over 800 MB. And it still can't play Pong.

Now with Rust and other languages, I'm back home in Emacs, but the keystrokes do tend to bother me a little. I liked the HJKL movement keys in vim - I just hated the modality and think I spent more time trying to figure out "my cursor is here, but I need move it over there - so first I need to jump on that log, shoot the rocket to knock down flowerpot then run quickly while the line is falling to catch it and K it to the next line" \-- like some sort of weird text editing puzzle (I wonder if you could make a vim code golf puzzle set).

Emacs has these bindings that feel like finger yoga, even when I've remapped Caps, control, half my F-keys, etc. What I really need to do is remap my toes to my hands, I think.

It would have been really nice to see C-[hjkl] style movement (with maybe CS-[HJKL] be the distance mods or something). It's too late now. You of course you can remap those keys, but too much of that behavior is baked in to people).

Maybe one day when I'm old and gray I'll do the Knuth thing and start a new text editor, but before that I'll probably need to redo the monitor, mouse, and keyboard and that is just too much right now.

<comment><USER24> evil-mode

vim keys in emacs.

<comment><USER68> I don't want vi modality. I find it more annoying than emacs yoga-esque bindings. I want more sane emacs bindings.

<comment><USER12> You can make them yourself, and I think there are some packages for that as well.

<comment><USER24> Coming from evil-mode, I often have to make them myself, and it is a pain. Every mode needs new keybindings to fit in with whichever scheme you use. I imagine it would be worse with custom keymappings that aren't evil-mode, because I can at least use the default keybindings in input mode as-is with evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Moving to the far left-corner of the keyboard to reach Escape has been a major annoyance for me. On the other hand, the Caps Lock key on my keyboard is almost useless. I never use that key. Is there a way to map Caps Lock to Escape in Vim?

<comment><USER70> Run setxkbmap in your .xinitrc if applicable:

      setxkbmap -option caps:escape

Linux desktop environments' keyboard configuration tools should also let you do this.

<comment><USER69> I am using Windows. Is there a lightweight solution to map Caps Lock to Escape on Windows?

<comment><USER71> Copy and paste the below into a .reg file and run it. I used Sharp Keys ( [https://sharpkeys.codeplex.com/](https://sharpkeys.codeplex.com/) ) to create it, but since every major Windows 10 update resets your key mappings I just extracted it from the registry and double click the reg file after each update.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Vim isn't the best tool for every task

Begone with your heresy!</comment>


NearbyGamers: Find people in your vicinity for Euro-style games, RPGs, and TCGs - <AUTHOR> http://nearbygamers.com/

<comment><USER2> Yeah I've been following the guy for a while, the site is cool and I've used it once or twice!

<comment><USER3> Following me?

<comment><USER2> I meant reading your blog and such :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is the site down?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this just now. Since I'm into European-style board games, I thought I'd post it.

<comment><USER3> I kept telling myself I'd do a "Ask YC: Review my site" after the next redesign, or the next...

thanks for posting it. :)</comment></comment>


Pine64 announce the Pinecil, TS100 compatible RISC-V soldering iron - <AUTHOR> https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/july-updatepmos-ce-pre-orders-and-new-pinephone-version/ <comment><USER2> > Obviously the one crucial bit of having the Pinecil actually functional is > having software support for the device.

Personally, I would've thought the one crucial bit of a functional soldering iron is to deliver enough thermal power at the tip to melt solder. All the software in the world won't help if the hardware can't manage that.

<comment><USER3> Apparently the quality of the temperature control also matters quite a bit. It seems the TS100 has little problem in either of those departments [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgrB5P-rDLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgrB5P-rDLw) [https://hackaday.com/2017/07/24/review-ts100-soldering- iron/](https://hackaday.com/2017/07/24/review-ts100-soldering-iron/) , especially if you use a 24V power supply. It's also embarrassingly cheap compared to the mid-spec soldering irons from prestige brands which it tends to match.

<comment><USER4> ts100 with a 4S lipo at ~14v has no issues getting to temp or staying at temp. it's great kit, highly recommend. this pine64 pencil looks awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meanwhile on planet Earth, my Metcal production iron doesn't even have a computer in its brain.

The important bit of the iron is not really the brain but the latency of the control loop and the absolute power delivery which is easy enough to solve with a couple of lm358's on the ts100 element/sensor.

<comment><USER6> That's a weird flex, given that Metcals are a high-tech device, using a patented technology and were exorbitantly expensive before patent ran out. They still are, compared to the bargain basement soldering iron pricing. When the patent ran out, the original engineers ran off to start Thermaltronics.

We've all accidentally left the soldering iron on, sometime in our decades. The sensors in the iron lets it shut off and not burn your house down. Having an firmware (like the TS100 or TS80) means you can fully customize its behavior unlike most consumer devices. (I _wish_ there was a microwave oven whos firmware I could tweak in order for, eg the popcorn button to make popcorn how _I_ like my popcorn.)

Soldering irons are at this fairly unique intersection of consumer device and hardware hacker that I'm really surprised by the some of the luddite attitudes around here. I bet there's some cool firmware mods you could do if you have to solder something that looks like a heat sink. (Eg maybe it could do 18650 cells, if you don't have a welder.)

The other innovation of the TS100 is that battery-power capably powers a soldering iron. The TS100 is a bit older than the TS80, and can use 12V rechargable battery packs (eg for RC cars/planes); the TS80P can use recent USB-battery pack powering standards. It doesn't do much at the workbench, but if you're one of those people that leaves the house (modulo Covid), it turns out to be really useful! In decades prior, butane (cigarette lighter fluid) powered soldering irons existed, but could be persnickety and were a special version to buy. Now, just bring the iron along with USB battery pack you were probably gonna bring anyway.

<comment><USER5> The metcal PS900 is actually cheaper now than the equivalent bottom end Weller TCP units and much much cheaper than the Hakko FX951 irons.

The TS type irons and the T12's are however 100% not safe devices. The tip mount/socket shorts out which will blow the guts out of the MOSFET and there are various brown-out conditions which cause the thing to crash and dump the entire supply into the tip until it glows orange. And also the thermal sensor fails unsafe. That risk is especially high when you have high capacity supplies.

An image to back up my claim:

[https://imgur.com/uE1CPn0](https://imgur.com/uE1CPn0)

Buying a decent, simple iron will probably cost you less than your house does if it goes up.

As for leaving irons on I have never done it. Metcal PS900 also has an optional stand which puts the iron in safe standby mode. They heat up within 2 seconds when you pick the iron up as they do not use normal heating elements. They use RF heating. There is no condition that can cause a complete thermal overload cycle.

On the T12 irons which are sometimes mentioned they are borderline illegal when it comes to the power supply design earthing and will quite happily kill you dead if you don't rework them first.

Is economy worth it? Probably not.

<comment><USER7> > The metcal PS900 is actually cheaper now than the equivalent bottom end > Weller TCP units and much much cheaper than the Hakko FX951 irons.

\- Hakko FX951 is listed for $269.77, less tips

[https://www.hakkousa.com/products/soldering/hakko- fx-951-sol...](https://www.hakkousa.com/products/soldering/hakko- fx-951-soldering-station.html)

\- Metcal PS-900 is listed for $275.93

[https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Metcal/PS-900](https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Metcal/PS-900)

The statement that the PS-900 is much much cheaper does not appear to be accurate now.

<comment><USER5> Check prices in Europe as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Overall I've been very impressed with pine64 lately. They've been really stepping up their game. The tablet, phone and now this. All in the span of a month and a half, during quarantine/lock down. Good job pine64, keep it up!

<comment><USER9> I worry that they're doing too much. Surely shipping PineBook Pros in quantity should be the top priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Probably a dumb question to some but why does a soldering iron need more than temperature regulation?

<comment><USER11> The TS100 and the subsequent TS80 soldering irons were innovative for a few reasons. The heating element is in the tip rather than the body of the iron. This means it can reach a high temperature (e.g. 350C) using much less power than a traditional iron. This means that it can be powered with a USB power bank and makes it a great iron for using off the grid or in the field. This also means it's very lightweight which makes it easier to handle for delicate soldering work. Even if you're working at your desk, being able to power it with a portable power bank means you can more easily move the power cable so it does not get in the way (also I believe the TS80 comes with a silicone USB cable which is really flexible and easy to manipulate). Another nice feature is that it has an accelerometer which means it can automatically drop to a lower temperature when it's placed down making it a bit safer. Lastly, the firmware can be replaced and people have added features such as a temperature boost mode, power level monitoring and so on: [https://github.com/Ralim/ts100](https://github.com/Ralim/ts100)

Normally, you can get these irons for $80-$90 so a $24.99 iron that uses the same tips and software would be an absolute bargain.

<comment><USER12> > The heating element is in the tip rather than the body of the iron.

That was an innovation compared to old pen shaped irons, but our old beloved gun shaped solder irons were much better wrt heat transfer: the heating element wan't just inside the tip, _it was_ the tip. that's why they could deliver insanely fast heating times like two or three seconds from turned off to maximum temperature. I still have a couple of them, and they literally spank my Weller styluses asses when soldering heavy stuff, but alas their shape and big tips aren't suitable for use on very small stuff, not to mention SMT devices.

<comment><USER13> > they literally spank my Weller styluses asses

The ass-end of the stylus is pretty obvious, but where's the appendage that the gun uses for spanking? Also, you may want to cut back on the psychedelics while soldering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At the price point of $25, it's super tempting. Honestly not too sure what I would do with the RISC-V functionality. But I guess it would be fun trying to program a RISC-V based uC which I never done before. Would be very interesting if they add some I/O pins to it.

<comment><USER15> Holy shit, if this thing is anywhere close to a TS100 for $25, it's going to be amazing. The TS100 is by far the best soldering iron I've ever used (though I haven't used any $200+ ones).

If you can get one for $25, don't even think about it.

<comment><USER16> 25$ is low indeed

I wish someone designed flat tips for desoldering small multipins

<comment><USER17> I've been using these in my TS100 and they work great. Sticks out too far, but still works:

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849007766.html](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32849007766.html)

Photo:

[https://i.imgur.com/v0HV86r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/v0HV86r.jpg)

<comment><USER16> wow, thanks. Better than nothing !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone else who's wondering why a RISC-V soldering iron is special, it's not necessarily for soldering:

> This means you can use the Pinecil as a platform to create something > completely different based on this platform, such as a drill or a > multimeter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, no WiFi? How do I signal my coffee machine to make a cup every 2 hours of soldering? That's a fail!

/s

Seriously, I'm not for putting too much silicon into a thing that should only keep control of the tip temperature, but the price makes it very tempting, and I'd love to support Pine64 for their work on open source devices.

</comment><comment><USER19> NB: Cannot buy it yet; give it a few months. But you can pre-order a PinePhone. If you do, make sure the phone is the only thing in the cart, or the order won't work.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who has an 80% chance of destroying whatever I'm trying to solder, any improvement in what I'm using would be super welcome.

</comment><comment><USER21> The Pinecil sounds interesting! I have a Antex Gascat 75P [0] propane powered soldering iron that I absolutely love! I keep it in my "primary" toolbag along with a few feet of Sparkfun's 0.020" "special blend" solder [1] (which is also excellent). It can be a bit finicky to ignite, but it heats up super-quickly and can be refilled easily from a common-or-garden propane refill.

I'll definitely have to try the Pinecil, even if it's just because "RISC-V!".

[0] [https://www.antex.co.uk/products/cordless-soldering- irons/ga...](https://www.antex.co.uk/products/cordless-soldering- irons/gascat-75p-kit/)

[1] [https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10242](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10242)

<comment><USER22> That "special blend" solder is interesting; it appears from the MSDS to be a standard water-soluble flux core paired with an almost-standard SAC305 lead- free solder (there's some Sb added). I'm not sure what's so nice about that, but I'll take their word for it.

What I would NOT do, though, is choose this stuff for general purpose use, especially "tool bag" use. Water-soluble fluxes are powerful, but they __must __be cleaned or you 'll have corrosion troubles. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'd prefer a RMA-type flux here.

<comment><USER21> Actually I have been using the special blend with a Hakko FX888D soldering station on my workbench for a few years now and haven't had any problems with corrosion with this solder/flux (mostly for through hole on headers etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if the current crop of FLOSS phone companies (pine64, Purism, etc) have sustainable/profitable businesses? That seems to me the most important variable when setting my hopes of getting a usable Linux phone anytime soon.

<comment><USER24> pine64 has been making open source hardware for a while, with a bunch of single board computers similar to the raspberry pi. They're probably going to be around for a while.

Purism appears to be having hardware issues with the Librem, and from what I've heard their laptop hardware is also pretty bad.

<comment><USER25> Do you have any sources for problems with Purism Laptops?

Just out of curiosity as I only heard about problems with the Librem 5, never about problems with their laptops.

<comment><USER24> [https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/purism- librem13v4/#hardware...](https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/purism- librem13v4/#hardware-reliability)

And the third top level comment here: [https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hr8hvi/not_recommend...](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hr8hvi/not_recommending_purism/)

I've heard similar things in the past, but can't remember where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This calculator ought to not be made use of in circumstances where the warm resource is much smaller sized than the base of the heat sink Custom](https://heatscape.com/">Custom) Heat Sinks

</comment><comment><USER27> If you don't already have a soldering iron this is not a bad idea if you have a low budget. You should get a heat gun instead if you want something useful in today's modern age though to work with SMDs unless you prefer baking all your components. A heat gun is much better for removing smd components and is a lot more useful than a clunky iron even if it's risc-v

</comment><comment><USER26> This calculator ought to not be made use of in circumstances where the warm resource is much smaller sized than the base of the heat sink [https://heatscape.com/](https://heatscape.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks interesting, especially USB-C input. There's a TS80 (and TS80P) which does Qualcomm Quick Charge (and the P for USB-PD) USB-C input, but the Pinecil's flexibility of both seems better. The TS80s also uses different tip form factors, so I would need entirely new tips compared to this.

<comment><USER29> I love the idea of using my lab power supply to power my soldering iron. I will gladly take back the space of my soldering station, it's separate power plug and wires, etc. Plus I'll be able to see current draw in real time.

<comment><USER17> I do this with my TS100 right now, when I'm gonna be running it for long enough that the Ryobi battery, which serves as its steady base, would not have a good time.

The TS100 can show you the input voltage and duty cycle, I wonder if there's firmware that calculates watts...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > The PinePhone can now achieve 100hrs standby time without modem

Is it really standby without the modem? Sounds more like sleep.

<comment><USER31> It's both, it's more like a baseline. I think modem-on sleep time can still be better than 24 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Unfortunate that they didn't improve the handle, but really nice effort nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> The post says they have improved on the ergonomics and the grip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tinkering electronically Let's celebrate and explore</comment>


My Occupation - <AUTHOR> http://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/07/my-occupation.html <comment><USER2> I appreciate that you give the world a window into your experiences and reflections.</comment>


LastPass command-line interface tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli

<comment><USER2> Nice... I'll reiterate the same plea I have every time LastPass comes up (I'm a premium subscriber and have been for years) - Focus on UI and UX. I don't need any more features, I just want a much higher level of polish across the Chrome Extension and Android app.

It still pops up on the top of the screen, pushing down the webpage, and since it's slow it takes a few seconds to do it so it pushes down the content while you are reading it. I've tried disabling it but it still tends to pop up - there's much more usable + pretty ways of doing it, see Chrome's built-in password manager.

<comment><USER3> Yes please! I don't need more features right now. Remove all the stuff that's useless 99% of the time. Like, do I really need to have the "password generator" option available at all times in the menu? Why does it take like 1 search and 3 clicks for me to look up a password? Why is the android app so clunky? Why do you tell me over and over and over again I have duplicate passwords? I KNOW! I'm sure there's more.

Lastpass is an excellent tool. The back end seems rock solid, but my god the UX is terrible. The latest update made it look better, but kind of made the UX worse.

<comment><USER4> Time and time again, after being frustrated with Lastpass's UX i think of how much nicer 1Password looks. I really miss that app. It's hard for me to suggest LastPass to people who aren't comfortable. I've heard people from 1Password talk about there design work. On those days of frustration, I wonder if LastPass a real UX team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote most of this for LastPass. The interface is based on my own pet project, "pass" \-- [http://www.passwordstore.org/](http://www.passwordstore.org/) \-- which sticks to a more traditional model of a simple directory of gpg encrypted files, integrated with git, and you get to decide where it lives. It's a simple bash script.

<comment><USER6> Just want to chime in. Your pet project is the only password manager I have used longer than a week.

Using dmenu with StumpWM, I show people I have an OS level keychain that I can pop open and search with a keyboard binding. My IT brethren nod with approval.

<comment><USER7> just modified the pass dmenu script to work with lastpass

      #!/usr/bin/env bash

      shopt -s nullglob globstar

      typeit=0
      if [[ $1 == "--type" ]]; then
        typeit=1
        shift
      fi
      name=$(lpass ls | dmenu)
      id=$(echo $name | sed -r 's/.*\id:\s([0-9]+).*/\1/g')
      if [[ $typeit -eq 0 ]]; then
        lpass show -c --password $id
      else
        xdotool - <<<"type --clearmodifiers -- $(lpass show --password $id)"
      fi

<comment><USER6> I do not use last pass but that xdotool idea is very slick. I will definitely employ that idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who thought if this was legit and genuine or a smart phishing attempt, it is legit: [http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/10/open-sourced-lastpass- comma...](http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/10/open-sourced-lastpass-command- line.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> As a premium subscriber, this is great. I had to weaken my github password 3 months ago because I started rolling VMs every other day and I had set random characters as my password. This means I can restrengthen it this weekend

<comment><USER10> Why not use keys?

<comment><USER11> Hopefully he means key passwords?...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just made a homebrew formula for this and sent in a PR

[https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33487](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33487)

<comment><USER13> beat me to it although i made a tap instead. but unless i'm mistaken you don't need openssl or libxml2 since osx provides those.

<comment><USER12> Someone beat me to it too

[https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486)

LOL

<comment><USER14> The first thing I thought after seeing this trending on HN this morning was "damn, maybe I'll finally have an opportunity to submit a formula to Homebrew!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dubious initial FreeBSD port: [https://github.com/Freaky/lastpass- cli](https://github.com/Freaky/lastpass-cli)

Don't use the edit command on anything sensitive without a suitably secured /tmp - ideally tmpfs and encrypted swap - since it writes the data to a tempfile for your editor to open.

</comment><comment><USER16> Probably a little late to the party but I made it into a Debian package: [https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass- cli/pull/26](https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli/pull/26). I did upload the packages here: [https://launchpad.net/~ridgebit/+archive/ubuntu/ppa](https://launchpad.net/~ridgebit/+archive/ubuntu/ppa). However, it'd be better if someone from the team actually put this into their own repo, as I have nothing to do with the project, and thus cannot be trusted :)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is great. Only question is, how can they justify charging $12/yr for mobile/Premium access when anyone can write a full featured iOS/Android app using this code as a template? All the right endpoints are there, 2FA support, local encryption code etc.

I know that their API was reverse engineered a million times already, but this just seems like they are explicitly enabling copycat apps.

<comment><USER18> There's presumably a pretty strong lock-in effect where I might trust Lastpass, but I wouldn't trust some random app author with literally all my passwords no matter what assurances the app download page provides.

<comment><USER19> For me, the reverse is true.

I would rather trust an app running locally behind my firewall than I would trust lastpass. If the app tries to sneak a copy of my passwords out of the network its going to have to find a way through the outbound firewall first. I have no such protection when using last pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am a premium subscriber and happy to see this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Building fails on Mavericks with the 10.10 sdk

        awk 'BEGIN {printf "#define CERTIFICATE_THAWTE \""} {printf "%s\\n", $0} END {printf "\"\n"}' thawte.pem > certificate.h || rm -f certificate.h
        awk: syntax error at source line 1
         context is
        	 >>> BEGIN <<<  {printf "#define CERTIFICATE_THAWTE \""}    {printf "%s\\n", $0} END {printf "\"\n"}
        awk: bailing out at source line 1
        cc -O3 -march=native -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -std=gnu99 -D_GNU_SOURCE -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wno-language-extension-token -MMD -Wno-deprecated-declarations -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.10.sdk -I/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents   /Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.10.sdk/usr/include/libxml2   -c -o http.o http.c

http.c:10:10: fatal error: 'certificate.h' file not found #include "certificate.h"

<comment> pi-rat I got a build working on OS X (mountain_lion, mavericks, yosemite) using homebrew, see PR here: [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486/files](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486/files)

<comment><USER21> Sweet, built fine with that. Oddly I already had all the depends installs, so not sure why the included make doesn't work. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just a PSA for mac users: Keychain Access.app has a command line interface: `security` . I use a special keychain for some of my TrueCrypt passwords, so I can mount them all with the same password via the command line via `security find-generic-password`

</comment><comment><USER23> Any ideas if CLI also supports login with a Yubikey device?

LastPass has Yubikey support for the Premium tier.

<comment><USER15> Just got it working - Yubikey support seems fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does LastPass work with IE enhanced protected mode yet?

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool but when's the PowerShell module coming out?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone avoiding Chrome because it won't show your passwords? - <AUTHOR>

This is very annoying and perhaps reason enough for me to not use it when it's released for the Mac. <comment><USER2> What do you mean won't show passwords?

wrench thingy -> options -> Minor tweaks -> show saved passwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try a newer version.

<comment><USER2> I'm running 126.96.36.199, is there a newer version?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not using it because it does not have a master password function and the google toolbar!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm avoiding it because it doesn't have a "Send Link..." command.

</comment><comment><USER5> One would hope that the Mac version uses the keychain.</comment>


Fast Document Rectification and Enhancement - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/08/fast-document-rectification-and-enhancement/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if the lines can also be automatically removed like the ones from the last gif.

Currently I'm using [http://whitelines.se](http://whitelines.se) paper but it's expensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I checked to make sure my dropbox app is updated. Is this feature only available on iphone, or is it part of their paid service?

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like they are using a 2D model for the paper being imaged. This won't work for curved/folded pages like something from a book

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of my favorite features of Evernote. Looking forward to giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the difference between this and CamScanner?

<comment><USER7> CamScanner seems to be a smartphone application for scanning documents; this seems to be an article that explains how Dropbox has implemented their document scanning functionality.</comment></comment>


Tesla Arcade - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/event/experience-tesla-arcade <comment><USER2> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER3> No. I have a Model 3 and there are several games in the arcade. I've played the old-school lunar lander while waiting to pick people up. The racing game is new, I'm guessing the software update will be pushed out soon.</comment></comment>


Analyse Asia 80: Approach Asia with Lisa Enckell - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/12/09/episode-80-approach-asia-with-lisa-enckell/ <comment><AUTHOR> Episode Synopsis: Lisa Enckell from Approach joined us for a conversation to discuss their new project Approach. We started with a chat on how she started from a theatre producer and journalist to her previous role as the vice president for marketing in Wrapp working between Sweden and San Francisco. Then she shared how both her husband and her will be traveling across the world to live in 10 countries for 5-6 months that have the largest economic impact for the next 20-30 years, while spending time working with the startups and doing some angel investments in these countries. We also discussed her experience with the first stop in Indonesia and journey across other parts of Asia such as China, and finally wrapped up with her thoughts on women in leadership and gender diversity in work.</comment>


Thiel Out of YC, could that limit his access to startups from Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-17/peter-thiel-out-of-y-combinator-two-year-partnership-dissolved <comment><USER2> That's too bad.</comment>


'Mindful people' feel less pain - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-mindful-people-pain-mri-imaging.html <comment><USER2> I think Marvin Minsky had it right in his book The Emotion Machine (2006):

From Chapter III. From Pain to Suffering

>Why does the sensation called pain sometimes lead to what we call suffering? How could such a simple event distort all your other thoughts so much? This chapter proposes a theory of this: if a pain is intense and persistent enough, it will stir up a certain set of resources, and then these, in turn, arouse some more. Then, if this process continues to grow, your mind becomes a victim of the kind of spreading, large-scale "cascade" that overcomes the rest of the mind, as we depicted in §1-7:

Then he quotes Daniel Dennett:

> "If you can make yourself study your pains (even quite intense pains) you > will find, as it were, no room left to mind them: (they stop hurting). > However studying a pain (e.g., a headache) gets boring pretty fast, and as > soon as you stop studying them, they come back and hurt, which, oddly > enough, is sometimes less boring than being bored by them and so, to some > degree, preferable."

The whole chapter is online: [http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/E3/eb3.html](http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/E3/eb3.html)

<comment><USER3> Hah. There's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache.

<comment><USER4> _Hah. There 's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache._

Or passed a kidney stone, or had a thrombosed hemorrhoid, or been tortured. I think there's a difference between breathing through lower back pain, and trying to contextualize someone threading a live wire up your urethra to make you talk. Even if you're exceptionally good with pain, most people are going to have trouble with _damage_ too. If you start cutting off someone's fingers, they're going to lose their zen in a hurry.

But hey, maybe we're wrong, but to people who think I'd say... go to a burn unit and see if you can make a difference where nothing short of a medically induced coma can. There's a Nobel prize with your name on it if you succeed.

<comment><USER5> There was the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who self-immolated in public. He appeared to remain calm throughout. Searching for "the burning monk 1963" will turn up images and videos, though I won't link to them here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%9...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c)

<comment><USER6> XKCD 846: "It's hard to imagine the pain of a deeply infected dental nerve. To get an idea, put your hands in a bowl full of ice cubes, and hold them there for 90 seconds."

Here Randall is using this example as one of the worst pains in the world, while others submerge themselves in ice baths voluntarily for health and enjoyment (eg. Wim Hof the ice man)

There is something about facing an unpleasant stimulus (to put it lightly) voluntarily that changes the neurology, and the subjective experience of it.

<comment><USER4> There's also something to be said about the brevity of pain, even if the end is death. As incredible as thst monk's composure was, hismnerves would have been dead within a short time, and he would have followed in a minute or two. Still an amazing thing to maintain himself in the face of that, butmits different than the same or worse pain for hours, days, or weeks. Being burned hurts, but anyone who has been badly burned can tell you it hurts so much more _after_ the acute injury. Sticking your hand in ice really does hurt, but you can stop it anytime you want, and while it hurts it's in an extremity. As someone who's done that, and had an infected dental nerve can attest, it hardly compares. This may sound off but the fact that the pain is in your head makes it somehow worse, more inescapable and debilitating.

I never felt so much relief as I did when the endodontist gave me novicaine, and a large bolus in your palette isn't pleasant either. Still it was like a cool breeze of relief next to that tooth. People are always scared of root canals, but the truth is that if you need one, it's actually nothing at all next to the pain that brought you there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mindfulness meditation taught me something that Haruki Murakami describes well about running: "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

<comment><USER8> Just curious what the difference is? Suffering is your reaction to the pain? Like if you're stoic you acknowledge the pain but continue on with out suffering?

<comment><USER9> I think the suffering is the result of your desire for things to be different than what they are. It's natural to feel like you want a headache to go away, but it seems to me that the more I accept that this is just the way it is right now, the more I embrace the pain and accept it as a part of me, the less power it has over me. And conversely the more I try to push it away like it's some kind of monster that's torturing me the more it becomes one. I have actually had that experience while meditating with a headache. Fully embracing and identifying with the pain makes it hurt less. It's a weird paradox because you can't start by thinking "I want this pain to go away so I'm going to embrace it". That doesn't work. You have to start with the attitude of "I'm going to be fully present for this moment, whatever it is". That is the path that leads out of suffering.

<comment><USER10> Suffering is not a desire that humans invent. It's hard-coded into every evolved creature so that the creature then goes on to do things to avoid said suffering. The source of these things that the creature is wanting is distinctly non-human.

There was no council of people who have decided that moving animals need to consume energy in the form of food, and that they would feel pain if they do not consume enough of this energy in time. Yet here it is, and every creature is enslaved by it.

Adult, well-read humans blessed with mental faculties are at times able to cheat the mental pathway and come up with ways to not have it show up at the forefront, but there's nothing self-inflicted about suffering, and assigning quasi-religious themes to this process is not doing us any favors.

<comment><USER11> > _It 's hard-coded into every evolved creature so that the creature then goes > on to do things to avoid said suffering._

I like the theory that many emotions, especially negative ones, exist to spur us to some type of action.

Anger means we need a way to resolve a conflict. Fear means we need to take steps to protect ourselves. Regret means we need some introspection to discover how we should do things differently in the future. Revulsion means we need to avoid something. (This applies in less abstract, more visceral ways too. Hunger means we need to eat. Physical pain means we are reaching our physical limits.)

Anyway, a lot of suffering comes about because we don't take any action. When the situation continues to exist, the negative emotion continues to exist.

This isn't to say we should just all act rashly to get rid of our negative feelings. Obviously the right action is important. But sometimes just getting started is enough to help feel better. And if you've already done what you could or should have, sometimes it helps to realize that or remind yourself of it.

<comment><USER10> My framework on this matter is much more... negative. I perceive these emotions more as a means of control, a form of slavery, and only a helpful guidance towards the original end. Kind of like you could give a slave some ways of foraging for food and some tools to fend off wild animals, but ultimately only so that the slave would build the pyramid better or faster, and not for the benefit of the slave.

This means that the suffering is not always aligned. This is very not obvious since our association of "feels bad == bad" and "feels good == good" is very strong since it's so obviously hardcoded. But it's not hardcoded for your benefit, it's there for building the pyramid, remember that.

A lot of it is quite obvious in the issue of short term vs long term gratification, but there are more complex interactions. People can drown in guilt when something bad was done to them, and a person may be very happy from a sexual encounter, unable to see the causal link between it and the alimony payments they'll soon be making. Reason is necessary, emotions are a blunt instrument. Intuition is better than raw emotions, but requires calibration. Emotion and intuition can be overwritten, to some extent, which is what most of this thread is about.

But quite often, the incentives do align, as we're one of the more advanced and successful species out there, which means we're less likely to be afflicted with the kinds of sufferings and pleasures that lead to a loss of power (i.e., musth in elephants).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unhappiness comes from reality not meeting expectations. Have no expectations and always be happy. Worrying about events outside of your control is pointless. Everyone needs some stoicism in their lives. Indifference is a power

<comment><USER13> That's easy to say, and very difficult for people in certain circumstances. With chronic illness and chronic pain, life can be very, very unbearable. We do have a built-in expectation of being able to, for instance, exist without being brought back to the world of pain every 3-5 minutes at random intervals. Not every expectation is willed into existence.

<comment><USER12> Agree that in situations where you're experiencing chronic pain is much difficult but having a stoic mindset can reduce the domino effects of pain. Anxiety is the difference between reality and expectations, and worrying about whether it's going to get worse or last forever is only going to make it worse. A stoic realizes that physical pain is sensory based and this pain is an automatic response from the body. The pain they bear with but don't react negatively and pessimistic about possible outcomes imagined by the mind. Celebrating the few moments of feeling no pain is way more effective than stressing over all the time when it does hurt. Easier said than done of course

<comment><USER14> As a chronic migraine sufferer, I do have an ability to compartmentalize the pain, but only to an extent. There are also very hard constraints on my comfort. If I'm in pain there are any number of things that a pain free person could on average do that would spike the pain above the "freak out" point.

Stoicism is definitely something I practice, and migraines easily surpass that. Some I get are known as "suicide migraines". In short, the monks pain ended with his life within moments, but chronic pain by definition lasts longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anecdata, but I have a condition that led to a childhood and young adulthood of chronic pain. I noticed my way of handling pain I am aware is going to happen is vastly different to other scenarios. If I know it's going to happen, I feel it but feel no need to react. It just happens, and I can keep thinking and operating as if nothing is going wrong. But I still react to unexpected bumps even if they don't actually hurt that much (or at all).

I just thought it was nifty that my body can tell the difference and is happy to bypass the reactive part of pain when it wouldn't help.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've definitely felt this. I'm more 'mindful' as the article says.. in the sense that I can step outside my emotions and control them.

As in, if I'm getting angry, I can step outside the anger and evaluate whether it's necessary or helpful at the moment or not. If it isn't, I stop it. Otherwise, I let the anger creep into my voice to make the other person more receptive to the urgency of the situation.

It works similarly for other emotions: like, fear, shame, jealousy, frustration or even sadness... which is why I don't often cry at funerals.

I don't know if that makes me a sociopath or not, but it definitely makes me more rational.

That said, I also seem to feel a lot less pain than my wife who tends to panic easier. If I stub my toe, cut my finger or even accidentally grab a falling soldering iron from the wrong end, I can disassociate from the pain, or at least give it a back seat. The hand is mine, but the pain feels like someone else's.

As such, I get a lot more cuts and bruises than my wife. I've even had instances where I had bleeding cuts on my hand that I kept thinking were itches.. I kept confusing the blood for mysterious coppery liquid oozing out of the device I was repairing. Turns out I'd nicked my fingers prying it open.. explained how the liquid kept coming back after I wiped it.

<comment><USER17> Are you sure you're just "more rational"? None of that seems mindful. It sounds like you're bordering dissociative disorder.

<comment><USER18> You've taken someone's mastery of a life skill we expect of all adults (emotional self-control) and are pointing to the closest pathological condition you can find even though it's mile and miles away from what the parent poster describes.

<comment><USER17> Parent poster is confusing his own blood with "mysterious coppery liquid", even after wiping it several times off his fingers. That's not a good sign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Amazing. There's actually worse popular science reporting out there than what _Popular Science_ puts out.

<comment><USER20> In what way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I understand correctly, they say that meditation deactivates default mode and this has a positive impact on pain tolerance. Interestingly, there is lots of discussion on the importance and value of default mode for creativity and other things. Are these at odds or have I misunderstood?

<comment><USER22> I had never heard of "default mode" before this. Do you have any suggested reading on the topic, especially around creativity?

<comment><USER23> Maybe only tangentially related, but Michael Pollan's recent book about psychedelics "How To Change Your Mind" goes in-depth on this. There's something about being able to quiet the "default mode network" that lends the mind to transcendental/creative thought. The same effect can be achieved through meditation or breathwork.

<comment><USER24> Also moral tribes, by Joshua Greene. These 2 were the best books I read this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The concept of being more pain-free is dangerous to take at face value. Being 'pain-free' through mindfulness comes from a deep understanding of any given pain, which comes from feeling it fully and coming to terms with that feeling. Which, is itself very painful.

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone is interested in developing mindfulness, I like Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

<comment><USER27> I've been listening to his Guided Mindfulness Meditations a few times a week. The body scan has been a phenomenal way of for me to relax into the difficult emotions and feelings I sometimes experience. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER28> I can't stay awake through it. Which is okay. I often don't sleep well so I'm chronically deprived.

<comment><USER29> Don't lie down while meditating and don't meditate in your bedroom. Also try not to have your head resting on anything while meditating. Lastly, apparently with certain kinds of meditation if you do fall asleep that's ok too - it's your body ridding itself of fatigue - you probably need more sleep :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Pain is also linked to fear, so more mindfulness, less fear and less pain. Some people, while physically training can inflict extreme pains on their bodies, but without any fear whatsoever, so they're ok, even enjoying it for some, "working hard!"

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know how much I really believe this. Could this be a case of false correlation, as opposed to causation? Most medical advice for dealing with pain tells you to distract yourself from the pain, and certainly not to focus on it. Whereas mindfulness exhorts us to focus on our immediate circumstances, and not distract ourselves with more abstract thoughts. These 2 approaches to pain-management seem very contradictory.

[https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/qa/what-are-some- ways-...](https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/qa/what-are-some-ways-to- distract-yourself-from-chronic-pain)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15745617](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15745617)

</comment><comment><USER32> [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-mindfulness- meditation-s...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-mindfulness-meditation- science-based/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Or people who feel less pain gravitate toward being "mindful".

Not that we can get an objective definition of "mindful" and "pain". Also we have no objective way of measuring either.

</comment><comment><USER34> Didn't realize that neuroscience has investigated mindfulness directly like this. Very cool. I've long found that practice useful, to focus as directly on pain as I can; it becomes manageable, even sort of interesting in a way. The alternatives, like attempting to escape via addictions / distractions, don't usually turn out well.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've done more Yoga than most and suffered from chronic pain after a climbing accident for a long time. The reaction to pain makes a big difference, and it's very difficult to react in a sane way when your ego is left running the show while you're out time traveling.

</comment><comment><USER36> In certain practices pain is treated as a message and your best response is to attentively listen to it, without judgement and even without a desire to end it. This, naturally, changes the way one experiences pain.

</comment><comment><USER37> They may experience the same intensity of physical pain, but _feel_ less of it, which makes sense as mindfulness meditation trains one to emotionally dissociate from anything painful (affectively or physically).

</comment><comment><USER38> So if the suffering of others bothers us, all we need to do is remind ourselves it is their fault they are letting the pain get to them, and go on about our business. Hurrah!

</comment><comment><USER39> My experience is that stopping and paying attention to a stubbed toe makes it more bearable than yelling and hopping around the room.

<comment><USER40> If not for yourself, for your roommates and cat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's interesting that I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the skeptical comments.

</comment><comment><USER42> > "Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too > much emotional reaction or judgment," said the study's lead author, Fadel > Zeidan

I've always thought of the word "mindfulness" as one of those vague, new-age nonsense terms, like "psionic body energy" and "ethereal consciousness". Even given the above quoted definition, I still have no idea what it means. Does anyone know what is an example of mindfulness, or an example of the opposite? I don't know anyone, besides maybe Alzheimer's sufferers, who is actually unaware of the present time.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the many replies. I think the variety of different answers speaks volumes about this topic.

<comment><USER43> I'm sure this isn't entirely accurate, but I think it can be analogized to Sherlock Holmes' powers of observation. Everyone sees but they don't observe. They don't notice details about anything. Mindfulness is like that but more internal. Of course everyone is "aware" of the present time in a trivial sense, but lots of people spend a ton of their time lost in daydreams or reliving old arguments or mindlessly browsing FB or Hacker News. And it's not that that's a bad thing, just that they have no idea what their brain is doing, they just let it go wherever it will. Mindfulness is actually witnessing and understanding your state of mind.

I feel like the opposite of mindfulness is when you're driving to work in the morning and you realize you're already there and you have no idea where the time went.

<comment><USER44> Agreed.

Also I firmly believe that most of modern life causes that.

Walking, climbing, physical efforts, crafting.. and others, aller require a vastly deeper engagement. Oh also music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As do psychopaths.</comment>


Let's kill the yearly review. - <AUTHOR> http://tryambition.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Real time discussions between employees and management instead of some arbitrary scores for goals set 11 months ago that are then fitted to a bell curve (Yahoo, AIG, many more). I haven't given Ambition full look-see yet, but I really, really appreciate the sentiment.</comment>


Location-based marketing campaign, powered by LOC-AID - <AUTHOR> http://www.loc-aid.com/ShopAlerts_powered_by_LOC-AID <comment><AUTHOR> Earlier this year, in a new attempt to attract more customers to its stores, North Face, which sells outdoor apparel and gear, had decided to adopt a novel strategy of location-enabled mobile ads which was powered by LOC-AID. In a nutshell, the company sent promotional text messages to people as soon they are in a defined radius of their stores. Cell phones have long intrigued advertisers because they form part of person's personal accessories which can be used as a vehicle through which you can track a person's location in relation to his or her distance from a store. Marketer's place value on the ability to message a person, when he or she is close to a point of sale.

North Face's mobile campaign early this year was location-enabled by LOC-AID Technologies, the largest mobile location aggregator in the Americas. The campaign was crafted by Placecast, a mobile ad company. The technology used is sometimes referred to as Geo-fencing. When a person crosses a virtual threshold, a text message is sent, but conditional on the person having accepted to receive messages. Placecast uses a number of techniques like triangulation and a phone's GPS signal to establish its precise location. In suburban areas the texting range was set to be a mile from the store, while in urban areas it was half that. North Face was enabled to send messages about promotions and new arrivals in the first instance. Per the NYT article dated February 22, 2010, North Face would restrict the number of messages per week to avoid annoyance and will ensure the messages should not be construed as intrusive. Mobile advertising is expected to have a $ 1.4 billion budget by 2014.</comment>