Jason Blevins

Integrated numpads and navkeys end up gathering dust most of the time for my usage. I like the macOS global text nav shortcuts[0][1] better than the typical dedicated keys, and I rarely enter numbers in great enough quantity that speed matters. For the odd occasion I do need to enter numbers, I have a separate numpad I can pull out and set to the left of my keyboard, where it’s not dislocating my keyboard’s home row or messing with mousing space. [0]: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220217071143/https://www.hcs.harvard.edu…

The blog post mentions text expansion via Raycast, but macOS has had its own native text expansion for a long time now (I think maybe since 10.5? Would need to check) under System (Preferences|Settings) > Keyboard > Text Replacements, which comes with the added bonus of syncing to your other Macs and iDevices via iCloud. I've been using it for years and at least for my needs it works great. Not mentioned are the text navigation shortcuts that have been built into macOS for a similarly long period of time. They work in any text field in nearly every app (with exception to a few oddball apps that are usually built with "game engine style" UI frameworks), and come in both control-based emacs style and Apple style flavors[0]. I use these constantly and they work exceptionally well for smaller keyboards (e.g. 60% or HHKB). [0]: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

There’s also the fantastic deft mode for Emacs, which performs full text incremental search on a folder full of files: https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ Very fast (for my current scale of use, ~hundreds of files), and very easy to use.

Amen to that. I read a blog post somewhere (sorry, lost the reference) about a writer (non-programmer, mind you) who switched to Emacs for Org-Mode. Another extension that's great for writing/note taking is Deft [1]. Give it a directory (optional recursing) of .md, .txt, .org, etc. files, and it will let you filter through them instantly. I've been using this for a few years now and it's still my primary digital note-taking system. [1]: https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/

Keys, like passwords, can be leaked, so it's possible there are databases of leaked keys out in the world, because unlike PGP or SSL certs, ssh keys don't have a revocation mechanism built in. So they could just try all the known leaked keys - like they try known leaked or default passwords. Then there was this: https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey (tl;dr - there was a bug in debian that caused ssh-keygen to only produce a very small number of keys rather than keys distributed across the whole keyspace). After that became public the bots were all about trying those keys for a few years after. To this day it's recommended to not used keys from that set. Point being - the bots will try because it the tiny marginal cost is not high enough to stop the attempt.

org-mode is great. I really like deft (http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/) in tandem with Notational Velocity and SimpleNote.

> I'm pretty sure that the HN community likes to read thoughtful, thoroughly > researched comments that are somewhat longer than one-liners. Could not agree more and this is a great side effect of the time out. It gives the commenter yet another reason to compose their comment in a real editor. Personally I find the comment text box is too small to do a decent job of assessing and editing my comment. A real editor also makes it easy to format the above blockquote[^1] or to insert[^2] logical and consistent footnotes.[^3] [^1]: http://www.nicemice.net/par/ [^2]: http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ [^3]: I just wish markdown-mode would renumber the footnotes if I go back and insert a new footnote. As it is I have to pipe the output through pandoc

In that case, check out Deft: http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ It's a lot like Notational Velocity, but for Emacs. I've used it for over a year and love it.

If you live inside emacs like I do there's a great mode named Deft[1] that emulates the important parts of NV, written by Jason Blevins who also wrote Markdown Mode. It's great for editing my personal wiki[2]. [1]: http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ [2]: http://www.petekeen.com/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki

> how do you manage information from digital content, e.g., notes from reading technical/research articles or blog posts? If I could always remember the right keywords to search for the articles I had in mind, I'd just do that. For online content, most of the time I'll wait for a later 'cache miss' before any bookmarks/notes. (I'd either come across content when procrastinating on HN/etc., or from looking for it while doing a task. For the former, it's low-effort consumption. For the latter, it's hard to know if it's going to something I have difficulty finding later. IMO, it's not worth putting easy-to-Google things in; lots of stuff is easy to Google for). For storing stuff, I prefer bookmarks to end up in pinboard, and notes to end up somewhere in org-mode. I've found the zetteldeft package to be useful for me. https://www.eliasstorms.net/zetteldeft/ (builds upon deft. https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/ ). - If in rare cases I find I want to remember some key idea or jargon without having to look it up, then I'll go to the effort of adding it to Anki.

Emacs ofc :) seriously it should not be too much work although org-mode syntax would be even easier, there is a markdown mode here: https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/ The email part is not something i have done myself but it has been a feature for a very long time and you can find plenty of guides online.

Ask Jason Blevins: https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/

Coming from the distribution that didn't generate SSH keys correctly for two years (insane security impact), that's a bit rich. Source: https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey

Periodic reminder that many emacs-like keybindings exist in almost every text field in macOS: Ctrl A, E, P, N, K, Y, T, and probably others I'm forgetting (start of line, end of line, previous line, next line, kill (delete everything to the end of the line and put it in a special pasteboard), yank (paste from that special pasteboard) and transpose characters). Edit: more complete list here: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd Edit 2: can't believe I forgot Ctrl-D, which is forward delete.

Debian maintainers are experts at touching things they shouldn't and creating a mess in the process. The worst case, by far, was when they broke the RNG of SSH key generation: https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey#:~:text=In%20May%202008%2C%20a%20… Those guys are out of control and constantly having conflicts with upstream, I'm astounded to see the amount of support I see for debian in this thread.

My main authoring tool is then Emacs Markdown Mode (https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/). For data entry, it comes with some bells and whistles similar to org-mode, like C-c C-l for inserting links etc. I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.

> Edit: also, why should a package like ssh have so many random dependencies? They should make sure these kind of packages have the least of dependencies especially on these kind of packages that have one maintainer to reduce the security risks? Using standard libraries for common stuff like compression, cryptography and whatnot is vastly more preferable over everyone shipping their own crypto, or worse, patches of crypto (see the Debian SSH key vulnerability of 2008 for an example [1]). For protocols it's in the end just as bad, it's a nightmare to keep different versions of the same program to be able to talk to each other, but now imagine a literal ton of programs who all have a wild mixture of statically shipped libraries, homegrown stuff that has barely been tested... no, just no. Not a world I'd like to live in. [1] https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey

Random numbers are used to generate your TLS certificate key or your SSH key. If one can predict how a TLS or SSH key was generated they could impersonate the key holder. Here is an explanation of what was possible when a Debian packager mistakenly introduced a patch which reduced the SSL certificate keyspace in 2008: https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey The possibilities of keys which were generated by this random number generator was so small, that a brute-force attack on keys was feasible. That being said, for years, random number generators have been using random signals coming to your computer (key strokes, network packets, ...) and feeding them into a sponge function. You don't need lava lamps or pendulums to generate random numbers, it's just for the press. https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/

Even emacs has a markdown mode: https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/

btw. macOS supports some Emacs(ish) keybindings by default https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

For (neo)vim users, there's notational fzf [1], which also requires fzf to be installed [2]. For Emacs, there's Deft [3]. They all what to me are nvalt's core functionality which is fuzzy search into quick note creation/editing. They can also be used in conjunction with nvalt or other markdown based applications since all of them use plaintext. For Deft, you can also choose to create .org files. [1] https://github.com/Alok/notational-fzf-vim [2] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf [3] https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/

Another similar one (perhaps worse!) from the same era: https://jblevins.org/log/ssh-vulnkey

It's been a while since I used a Mac but my recollection is that the same Emacs style key bindings were available for all text fields pretty much without exception. https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

Many of these Emacs/readline shortcuts work in 99% of Mac apps too, which is nice. https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

I use deft. A hot key brings up the list, then typing narrows the list based on name or content. https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/

Probably around that by default, maybe a bit more: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd https://www.howtogeek.com/681662/35-mac-text-editing-keyboard-shortcut… But all of them need to work, along with system-wide custom ones. Text substitution is also an issue.

Well, no. That's not what we'd say to use for this (although you could). [Deft](https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/) would be a better comparison/equivalent. Regarding OP, it looks very snappy! I like it. Looks like it leverages `fzf`. Can we swap it out for something else?

The origin of those shared commands isn't from readline, but rather from emacs key bindings that made it into both readline and MacOS: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

If you're on macOS, you can move around without reaching for the arrow keys on a regular keyboard using emacs style movement keys. https://jblevins.org/log/kbd Chrome changed something a couple months ago and now some of these do the wrong thing so you have to use Safari.

You can combine org-mode with deft for quick note organization and lookup. https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/