I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I'm in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting")

if [[ -n "$ZOOM" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

Yeah. Heaviest awk I've ever done is extracting a value to a variable from a line with one pattern and using it to populate output from later lines matching another pattern.

Great, cause we haven't been burning enough energy jetting around the globe up to now. Glad they found a way to burn a whole lot more.

I’m not surprised Emacs users would be seeking them out

They aren't. Someone did it, probably more than one person, but if you look hard enough you can find people who do all sorts of weird stuff. It's not an "Emacs thing" at all.

This and the joke itself really make me wonder about bizarre Emacs (and Emacs users) that exists in people's heads.

I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don't know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it's Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

Funny how over the decades I've known many Emacs users, and many RSI sufferers, but the overlap in my Venn diagram of that is exactly one person.

Must have been the 323, before they rebranded to 3 in the early 2000s. Shame for you it was broken, they were good drivers' cars in a modest way

It's obviously trivial energy waste in the big picture, but it's 100% waste of you don't need it. Like turning on lights in empty rooms.

wasting energy to somehow stick it to the man?

Exhibit 56845 why humanity is fucking doomed.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807606899647.html is a not carefully vetted example

I was just thinking of the likes of what you get for searching for esp32 audio kit on AliExpress. About us$12. Has microphones, amplifiers, buttons etc.

Esp32 is very suitable but they jumped through a lot of hoops to recreate the ESP audio development boards you can buy for very little money with all of those parts already built in.

Not to mention an emissions decline means we're still making things worse, but not quite so quickly.

Obviously the path to making things better would have to pass through here, but just as people thinking electric cars are a solution rather than more of the problem, the delusion that this is winning is also part of the problem.

Could you explain what he's saying about caret (presumably cursor?) positions because I can't make sense of it.