Sunday, November 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 November 2023

Any Keyboard So Long As It Sucks Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • AMD could be looking to Samsung's 3nm process for some of the chips coming next year.  (WCCFTech)

    This would make sense, from a perspective of not putting all your eggs in one basket hanging directly over a hungry snake, and also from a perspective of not buying all your eggs from one egg shop.

    Samsung's 3nm process isn't quite as good as TSMC's, but that's like saying a Ferrari isn't quite as good as a Lamborghini, when the third option is an Edsel.


  • Monaspace is a monospace programming font superfamily from GitHub.  (GitHub)

    Good monospaced fonts used to be scarce; in the last couple of years there's been a flood of them.  This particular font provides five styles, seven weights, twenty-six widths, and twelve degrees of slant

    This has a couple of interesting features, including ten sets of ligatures - where adjacent characters are combined into a more complicated glyph - and what they are calling "texture healing".  If you have the letters imi in that sequence, in a normal monospaced font that looks ugly because the i characters are wide and the m character is squished.  Texture healing keeps everything in the monospaced grid, but lets the m fill the entire width of its cell while each i is moved to to give the m more room.

    If your application properly supports TrueType/OpenType fonts, it doesn't need to know anything about this; it uses a trick built into TrueType that us normally used to support variants of Arabic characters - in Arabic, letters can look different depending on where they are located in a word.

    You can play with it on the GitHub page and it certainly seems to work.


Disclaimer: 18 Essential Keys Should be enough for anybody.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:31 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 593 words, total size 4 kb.

1 What, in your opinion, are the "four essential keys"?  Just curious...

Posted by: Siergen at Monday, November 13 2023 12:42 AM (WUBpd)

2 Even worse than the missing 4EK are that all they layouts are ISO.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (BMUHC)

3 PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End.
Programming in an IDE without them means you spend a lot of time pressing Fn-Ctrl-Shift-Up or some similarly stupid key combination.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 13 2023 02:01 AM (PiXy!)

4 Siergen:  home/end/page up/page down.  Writing code is mechanically harder without those.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 02:05 AM (BMUHC)

5 Stylistically, Monaspace Neon and Xenon are pretty good. However, the asterisk is too high and the backtick is way too short (all other non-alpha chars are aligned properly for coding), and I always feel that dotted 00's are looking at me funny. The project has a CoC, of course, but it's only mildly toxic, and it's unlikely many people will contribute directly.

In any case, this reminded me to update my custom build of Iosevka; it looks like there's been plenty of development since I last built it, so I have some tinkering to do to incorporate the changes. Maybe they've finally got a backtick that isn't a little too high...

(I note that they've renamed their "offensive" "master" branch to "main"; I can't wait until someone complains that "main" is non-inclusive and triggering as well. All Branches Matter!)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, November 13 2023 02:46 AM (oJgNG)

6 I saw an interesting keyboard yesterday on another forum:  the Nuphy Air75v2.  wired/wireless, low profile mechanical keys, and apparently designed to sit on top of a laptop keyboard, covering it up, so you don't have to suffer with crappy laptops keys.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, November 13 2023 04:04 AM (BMUHC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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