Years ago I posted about getting the c-cedilla (ç) working in Fedora when using the US International keyboard with deadkeys. This has been a struggle for decades now and every time I set up a new Linux installation, I need to look it up.

That wouldn’t be such a problem, weren’t for the fact that the way to accomplish this seemingly simple task keeps changing over the years, so most of the information you find online is awfully out of date.

So for 2025, based on my experience with Fedora 42 (the current version at time of writing) – I suspect it would work similarly with other distros, but I cannot confirm it – this is how I did it.

First add these two lines to /etc/environment –

export GTK_IM_MODULE=cedilla
export QT_IM_MODULE=cedilla

And then in your home dir, add a file named .XCompose with this –

<dead_acute> <C>			: "Ç"	U0106 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<dead_acute> <c>			: "ç"	U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA

Then reboot and it should just work. To be fair, this is the easiest it’s been for years to get this done.

As a bonus, there are a few other changes that I’ve made in my .XCompose file to solve some annoyances I have with the US-intl keyboard in Linux. When I type fast, I tend to accidentally end up with a lot of mistakenly accented consonants that I don’t need in any of the languages I write in.

These are, of course, entirely up to you if you want them and have nothing to do with the cedilla. You can find them on Github.

Hopefully the search engine gods will help someone out there find this when they need it. Might just be me in the not-too-distant future.

This is vrey cool indeed but it could cause probelms int he future.

I’m going to leave this here in case someone out there is looking for the same thing, because this one was hard to figure out for me.

I’ve been using vim for a long time. Decades. Although it has never been my main editor (I used to be a proud emacs guy), vim is the editor I always go to when I need to edit something quickly.

My main editor these days is Visual Studio Code, with the VsCodeVim extension. I still use vim often from the vscode integrated terminal, which is ironic.

Anyway, after so many years using vim, I have developed muscle memory that is hard to let go of. I am very used to doing quick edits and using :x to save and exit. It’s a hard habit to quit.

But when working on vscode, this behaviour is not exactly ideal. I don’t need to close the active editor, so I decided to try and modify that behaviour by only saving the file instead of saving and closing the editor.

After a lot of trial and error and reading the extension source code, I finally found the solution:

"vim.normalModeKeyBindingsNonRecursive": [
    {
        "before": [ ":", "x", "<enter>" ],
        "commands": [ ":w" ]
    }
],
"vim.commandLineModeKeyBindingsNonRecursive": [
    {
        "before": [ "x" ],
        "commands": [ ":w" ]
    }
],

In both cases, I am replacing :x with :w, which is the behaviour I want. But this needs to be done in two different ways. When the editor is in NORMAL mode, we need to look for the entire sequence of commands (:x<enter>).

But if you type in : and wait a second, the editor will enter command line mode, in which we then need to capture the command (x) and then replace it with the :w command.

Hopefully this will show up on a search engine or AI output that will help someone out there not have to spend as much time as I did trying to look for this solution.

Since I was a kid, I’ve loved aviation. Being poor and all, I could never dream of pursuing it in real life, so flightsimming has been my “cheap” fix for many years. I put cheap in quotes because this is an expensive hobby, even if you don’t overdo it. Although I spend quite a lot of money on software, I try to keep things in check on the hardware department, as flightsim equipment can be very expensive. For GA flying, it would be great to have a G1000, but at $2,199 USD, that’s a no from me.

Also, I’ve long flown the Boeing 737NG series, and setting up the MCP (the autopilot panel) with the mouse is quite the immersion killer, not to mention quite hard during busy phases of a flight. But € 1,299 is also not worth it, in my opinion.

That said, I’d really like some hardware controls. And that’s when I ran into the Behringer X-Touch Mini. The X-Touch Mini is not made for flightsimming, though; it’s a MIDI controller and as such, it doesn’t have the “niche tax.” I got it from Amazon at $180 CAD.

With some tinkering, I could make this control many planes, from the B737 to the Twin Otter. It’s great. I’ve long used SPAD.neXt to control all my planes for two reasons:

1. I like tinkering with LVARs and also most third-party planes don’t expose all their controls to the simulator
2. I like the fact that it autoswitches to the correct control profile for whatever plane I’m using

As an example, here’s how I set up a knob to control the checklists on the Honda Jet.

It’s amazing! Also, I’ve been flying the ATR72-600 lately. Great plane! Also, it is similar enough to the Bombardier DHC8 (a.k.a. Dash-8) that it scratches my itch to fly regional Canadian routes, so I followed the excellent Les O’Reilly’s tutorial on setting the X-Touch Mini up for the ATR 72-600. Seriously, if you want to learn SPAD.neXt, check out his channel, it’s great.

However, I ran into an issue.

X-Touch Mini Leds not working

I could not get my leds to work with SPAD.neXt. No matter what I sent to the channel, the leds would not respond. I rewatched Les’ video, searched forums all over and never saw anyone having the same issue. I started suspecting a hardware problem. Eventually, I downloaded the editor from the Behringer’s website, solely for the purpose of seeing if I could get the leds to activate with it, to discard a hardware issue. This is when I found this –

For some reason, my X-Touch Mini came with the global channel set to channel 12, instead of channel 1 as, it seems, is the normal setting. This is why none of the settings worked, so if you run into the same issue, now you know. So to fix this, there are two possibilities:

1. Change all your SPAD.neXt settings to send the command to channel 11 (the channels are actually 0-based, so channel 12 in the UI is actually channel 11 in SPAD.neXt); or
2. Change the global channel in the Behringer editor to 1 – which will be default channel 0 in SPAD.neXT. This is what I’ve done.

Once that was done, everything worked perfectly. The LEDs change status even if a channel happens inside the simulator, so you can rely on them to know the current status of your automatics and navigation/comms. Really happy with the setup.

I’ve had a soft spot for mechanical keyboards for a long time. It’s a cliché, I know. I’m not a fan of loud mechanical keyboards, mind you. I’ve had my hands on Cherry MX Blues and found them to be so loud as to be a distraction during calls. And I found the Cherry MX Reds to be, well, too quiet. I found the Goldilocks zone to be in the Gateron MX Browns.

I have also come to particularly like the Keychron keyboards. They have a bit of a shaky reputation online, but I’ve never had any problems with my Keychrons and I adore them. This Keychron K8 with Gateron Brows keys has been my main keyboard for the last 2-3 years.

It is an awesome keyboard. I like how it feels, I like how it sounds, and I like how it clicks. It’s great.

The only thing my K8 lacked was a numpad, and since I have a certain passion for flight simulation, a numpad is something useful. I could buy a USB numpad. But where’s the fun in that? So this was the beginning of my search for a new keyboard.

After some online conversations, I settled for another Keychron favourite, the K4.

And this keyboard feels amazing. I cannot stress this enough: it’s the most pleasurable clicking experience of my life. In theory, it has the same Gateron G Pro Browns as my K8, but for some reason, it feels better. I’m not sure how else to put this: they feel less metallic-y. I don’t know how else to put it.

Great size, great feel, great quality. I fell in love with this keyboard the moment I unboxed it. Except it has a terrible flaw that might be evident from the picture, but that I never noticed until I started using it. Do you see it? It’s right there by the arrow keys. Do you see it now?

There’s no spacing. The arrows are right under the Enter key but there’s no padding space between them and, say, the 0 key on the numpad. Years of muscle memory down the drain. I could not reliably hit the arrows without looking. I tried. The layout of the Del, End, PgUp, PgDown keys was also a bit foreign to me, although I was able to adapt relatively quickly to them. The arrows keys though, I simply could not. I replaced them with some texturized rubber keys but I was still unable to hit them reliably. It was a pity.

Enter the mighty QMK Q6.

This keyboard is a beast! It weights 2.5Kg, which is insane. But OMG it feels so, so good. If I had to choose, I would still pick the feel of the K4, but it’s close. The Q6 has better keycaps though.

In terms of sound, it sounds very close to the K8, maybe a tad softer but it’s hard to tell. In terms of feel, it’s between the K4 and K8. It feels closer to the K8 than to the K4, but yeah, somewhat in the middle between the two.

I love it. I credit it for the fact that I am writing this right now: I just feel like typing! I really like this. As an additional bonus, its firmware’s source code is open source. I don’t plan to use it for anything, but it’s good to know.

However, it is not perfect. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy with this keyboard but it does have one extremely questionable design decision that I honestly can’t understand: it doesn’t have feet. It just lies flat on the desk which feels quite awkward to me. I cannot understand the decision to do that. I solved it with some cheap adhesive rubber feet, so all is good, but why Keychron decided to ship it like this is beyond. So be aware of this.

Other than that, I absolutely love it.

I just checked and it’s been exactly 1,594 days since I last posted on this blog. That’s 4 years, 4 months, and 12 days. This was, as is often the case with these, not planned. When I last wrote something here, I was working in a team set up as an R&D lab. Work felt quite fun and exciting and writing about it felt natural.

I then changed to jobs to a startup where things felt a tad different. It was a weird time for me: I met some great people there, people I still talk to and call friends. We put together a small team where I got to do some of the most fun work. Some of the people in that team I still talk to every single day. We’re still trying to put the group back together in some form in another company. And yet, my time in that company, outside that small team, made me feel quite small and inadequate. Writing about it did not feel natural.

I then joined HashiCorp, a company I’ve admired for years. I won’t go as far as saying this was a dream of mine, but when I got the offer, it sort of felt like it. I’ve been here for about two and a half years now and I’ve met some extremely brilliant people, and a few that I can call friends. I should have written about it. I wish I had. But by this time, the writing habit was already gone and life does what life does.

What else happened over the last few? Well, we became Canadian citizens. That was a blast, even if pandemic-style remove ceremony was a bit awkward.

We bought a house and got a new dog, Loki. He’s an English Cocker Spaniel, as would be expected of us, as he’s our 5th –

All in all, I can’t complain. On the other hand, I am getting older, which sucks, let me tell you that.

Anyway, I’d like to get back to writing a bit, I used to enjoy it quite a bit. We’ll see. Hopefully it won’t be another four years until the next post.