It's really quite something when an author manages to put down in words a thought or a feeling you were hitherto incapable of expressing. Bravo.
The dichotomy of best/worst — or, as I often think of it, acceptable versus available — is a tricky one, and it's not one which I feel I've yet solved. But I can certainly see how areas of my life tend towards the latter.
Take my dotfiles, for example. I spent ages writing a vimrc which sets up key bindings just so, the way I like them. Then one day I have to SSH onto a remote server and make a hotfix, and I start vimming files and get instantly confused when my muscle memory betrays me. I tried out Dvorak for a while, but then every time I had to help someone with their computer, or go to a client site, I was struggling to adjust to the 'normal' QWERTY layout. Eventually I realized it was better to learn the vim defaults like a pro, and then extend them without overriding them.
We can get very comfortable in environments we create for ourselves, expending huge quantities of energy to build a nest suited just for us. But Stoicism teaches us that fate is a lot more powerful than our nesting activities. One day a flood comes tearing through your house, or your hard drive fails, or you miss a credit card payment, and if you've wired your brain to only be happy in the environment you created, you are going to have a breakdown. In my childhood alone, I was evicted twice, moved countries several times, and had times when we were very well-off and times when we couldn't afford food. These things happen to all of us.
Nevertheless, in the Poisson distribution of cataclysms, before disruptive events, the Best approach may render you far more productive than the Worst. I consider this penalty to be my insurance policy; others have a different risk tolerance.
At my work, our book club is (re)reading The Pragmatic Programmer. There's a section which advocates picking one text editor, mastering its arcane secrets, customizing it until it's perfect, and never using anything else. All my colleagues happily agreed with this, and I couldn't quite express why I didn't.
Then I did a bit of pair programming with a few different people. In every case there was a significant learning curve just to follow what the driver was doing in their comfortable editing environment, and in the most customized cases, it was nigh impossible for me to drive at all.
So we relocated to my desk instead. I have a standard qwerty keyboard with vim, emacs, and textmate - all completely un-customized and ready to go. I couldn't care less which editor we use as I've learnt the bare minimum to be proficient in all of them. And importantly, so have my colleagues. Sure they grumble at not having their own autocompleting magic, but we can get our work done at a good enough rate, and either of us can drive.
(My previous work took this one (enterprise management style) step further and forced everyone to use the exact same model laptop, operating system, and editor. As a youngster I hated this required conformity. As a cynical old bastard I can see the logic...)
I definitely sit in the middle of the two camps. Not 'The Best', not 'The Worst'; just 'The Satisficing'.
I don't agree that in pair programming you should succumb to your pair or take a least-common denominator philosophy. When I pair, I always use a (customized) Vi, swapping between two editors if my pair's is different. I'm intimately familiar with mine (and he with his), so we're much faster this way (and happier, to boot).
Quickly getting off-topic, but you should have used vim's netrw instead of running vim on the remote host. You can use the remote host's file system as if it were local, over ssh.
I tried out Dvorak for a while, but then every time I had to help someone with their computer, or go to a client site, I was struggling to adjust to the 'normal' QWERTY layout.
I'm a Colemak user and while your point is on the mark (I do feel a bit stupid when typing on a qwerty keyboard now) I feel that using Colemak is still worthwhile for me as I spend over 90% of my typing time on my own computer and I type so much every day that I feel its worthwhile for me to optimize for that case, even if it makes the other cases much worse.
I did the same experiment with Dvorak and had the same experience.
At times my brain got really confused and I would mentally converge the convenient parts of both layouts (which brought up an idea of using predictive typing to use the most comfortable keystrokes of both layouts).
Interesting, why is it confusing to switch between two layouts? I speak both Russian and English and I can type without looking at the keyboard using either Russian or English layout (I'm sure this is not something outstanding). Perhaps when it comes to two layouts for the same language it might be more confusing.
The dichotomy of best/worst — or, as I often think of it, acceptable versus available — is a tricky one, and it's not one which I feel I've yet solved. But I can certainly see how areas of my life tend towards the latter.
Take my dotfiles, for example. I spent ages writing a vimrc which sets up key bindings just so, the way I like them. Then one day I have to SSH onto a remote server and make a hotfix, and I start vimming files and get instantly confused when my muscle memory betrays me. I tried out Dvorak for a while, but then every time I had to help someone with their computer, or go to a client site, I was struggling to adjust to the 'normal' QWERTY layout. Eventually I realized it was better to learn the vim defaults like a pro, and then extend them without overriding them.
We can get very comfortable in environments we create for ourselves, expending huge quantities of energy to build a nest suited just for us. But Stoicism teaches us that fate is a lot more powerful than our nesting activities. One day a flood comes tearing through your house, or your hard drive fails, or you miss a credit card payment, and if you've wired your brain to only be happy in the environment you created, you are going to have a breakdown. In my childhood alone, I was evicted twice, moved countries several times, and had times when we were very well-off and times when we couldn't afford food. These things happen to all of us.
Nevertheless, in the Poisson distribution of cataclysms, before disruptive events, the Best approach may render you far more productive than the Worst. I consider this penalty to be my insurance policy; others have a different risk tolerance.
Just my $0.02.