It is possible that the previous owner flashed firmware that doesn’t bind that key to anything. So the first thing to try would be flashing firmware that does bind the key. If that doesn’t work, the switch might be the problem. You could check on the back of the pcb if the soldering looks any different from the other keys. Even if it doesn’t you could reflow the key. If that doesn’t work you can unsolder the key and pull it out, open it up to see if anything is messed up like the contact leaf. You could try a different switch in that spot. If you put in a fresh key that works in the old spot and it still doesn’t work it might be the pcb. Maybe you need to reflow or replace the diode. If that doesn’t work it might be the contact pads on the pcb for the switch or the diode. When unsoldered and with the solder removed you should see a metallic ring around where the switch pin goes. If that is (partially) missing it will be trouble. It could also be the ‘wire’ that is etched into the pcb that goes from the pad to the controller. Either fixing the pad or jumping the wire is a bit more advanced (and a pain in the ass). I don’t have experience with that. Hopefully the problem is earlier in the chain. Good luck!

I’m not a thinkpad guy, but I thought one reason for people liking old thinkpads is that the old ones came with cpu’s that predate the intel management engine.

Interesting, I never heard of setting your shell in the emulator config. I just used ‘chsh’ once when I setup the install.

You can call it low effort, but Lemmy is a “link aggregator”. Even just sharing links has its value.

Yes, I use vim :) The spacebar is basically split into four buttons. The rightmost one is actually space. The leftmost one is shift. This means I only need one shift key as I don’t need to alternate left and right shift. The keys with arrows on them are not actually arrow keys, I use arrow keys on a layer. The left one pointing right is enter when pressed and FN when held. the right one is is -_ when pressed and a layer key when held. All the the mods on the left work like that too: tab when pressed, mouse layer when held. 0 when pressed, superkey when held. Esc when pressed, ctrl when held.

I ditched ZSH a long time ago because it wasn’t snappy. From what I remember, things like autocomplete, syntax highlighting, etc were written in ZSH and not build in. In something like Fish it is build in and it felt much faster to me.

Not OP but probably just the key next to the "’ key. The text on keycaps are just labels and do not dictate what the key does.

Well I guess they just don’t think it is necessary to have a n-ary tree. I use i3 but I rarely have more than 2 windows open per monitor (apart from my floating scratchpad terminal). Usually I have just two windows side by side per workspace. So if I would switch to bspwm I wouldn’t really be limited by it. That is also my reason for not switching to a dynamic tiler: I never split my windows enough to where it matters.

If you follow the github link (https://github.com/codybloemhard/eliza) you will find a picture of the matrix! I really like the upside down mods for space bars. It depends a bit on how you angle your hands when you type, but if I put the ‘space bar’ modifiers in their regular orientation, the edge will dig into my thumb. One thing I would do differently is the position of the screws. Two of the screws are right where my thumb comes down on the board when I press down the space bars. This was slightly irritating and I had to get used to it.

Haha. They are themed after ASCII control characters. ‘BS’ stands for ‘backspace’. Maybe you’ll like the ‘F_ack’ key as well :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character

‘stash’ is a command for the software ‘git’ which is something programmers use a lot. This GMK set has its modifier keys themed after that software. So the functionality of the keys is not really connected to what the text reads on them. In my case they happen to be shift and space.

People usually use either their left or right thumb for space (some bring a finger down instead of using a thumb). Whatever side you are used to, you would keep space at in your split space layout. For me that is the right side. The other one is shift for me so it does also get a lot of use, but yes the right one gets used more frequently.

Yes, you can bind something to the other spacebar. Shift, a FN key, backspace, enter, a letter, whatever you want. Normally you would have 8 fingers on the alpha cluster (the letters) and use a thumb for space thus using 9 digits (before someone comes after me for calling thumbs fingers lol). By splitting the space you effectively gain the ability to type with all your digits by giving each thumb a separate key. You can also split the space in more than two keys. Personally I quite like two keys per thumb.

Can’t imagine using full spacebar again after tasting split spacebars and 40’s. I’m never typing with 9 fingers again.

I’ll show that mf why his life is shit lmao

Speed of a package manager should never be a major concern nowadays.

I would like to disagree with this. It’s not just updates. Sometimes I add and remove a bunch of packages back to back to test stuff out or check soft dependencies or pull/remove dependencies for projects I am checking out and compiling or switch between prepackaged/compiled versions. For example I was once testing the difference between wine and wine-stable-ubuntu in combination with winetricks installed/uninstalled. That is four configurations and you might visit each one more than once. I once saw a classmate use the fedora package manager in real life and I thought it was quite slow. I am happy with pacman, it really rips through packages which is convenient.

I guess that is pretty funny, didn’t notice it while writing lol. When it comes to those seams, I think it depends on your font whether it will have seams or not. Colouring the background is more consistent in my experience.

I tried fastfetch which was very fast, but didn’t work correctly for me. It told me I had 16 flatpaks installed, but I don’t even have flatpak! On another preset it gave the wrong number of pacman packages installed. The coloured bars also rendered with visible seams in between because it uses characters instead of colouring the background. It also didn’t show my terminal font at all. I can’t open issues because I didn’t bother to activate 2fa on my github account. I ended up writing a simple fetch for fun, it shows pacman and rust packages, learned a few things about terminal escape codes.

Bloat is relative to the user. If I have a piece of software installed that I don’t use, it is bloat. If a program has features that I don’t use (especially if they get in the way) they are bloat. Random config and cached files from programs long gone are bloat. It is not really about saving CPU/RAM/disk resources. It’s like keeping my room clean. I also consider any UI element that is not strictly necessary bloat, because it gets in the way, takes up screen space and doesn’t look clean. I have 485 packages on my 3+ year old Artix system right now (and some things I compile). Sometimes it can be higher if I use some extra software. But more than 700 hundred packages will start to feel uneasy. An example of bloat: I used startx to start my X server (like almost everyone else). Then I replaced it with a small shell script (sx). It worked exactly the same for me, I couldn’t notice the difference. That means that everything startx provides over sx is bloat in my case: completely useless. You can see it as a form of minimalism.

but every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

It’s not that you don’t need or deserve it. The thing is terminal tools are already available. To get the same stuff with GUI someone is going to have to make that stuff. Most people with the skill to make things like that probably don’t care enough about GUI to be inspired to make such tools. Since using the terminal is easy and natural to them. When it comes to FOSS, since people work on it in their free time with no payment, they are likely to only put significant effort in things that they would use themselves.