Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 334 posts.

Tools & Productivity
286

History of Emacs and vi Keys (2010)

In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…

289

Programmers Should Automate More

Last week, I created a small script to aid my workflow which left me wondering why I didn't make it earlier. It adds an option in [Finder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finder_\(software\))'s context menu to start a static web server in any folder which makes it easier to preview static websites. Technically, it's…

292

More on GVFS

After watching a couple of days of GVFS conversation, I want to add a few things. What problems are we solving? GVFS (and the related Git optimizations) really solves 4 distinct problems: A large number of files – Git doesn’t naturally work well with hundreds of thousands or millions of files in your working set…