So I started looking to other themes. The default Pages gem mostly contains documentation themes without a post index. I liked the look of the hacker theme, as I am an avid Retro enjoyer. I soon found a Retro Windows 95 theme, but it was old and broken, and my attempts at repairing it led to not much. So, I started writing my own Jekyll theme.

The basic idea was clear pretty soon: I wanted it to look and be clean and simple, both in and out, and it should support blogging. I got inspiration from the layout of XKCD, with its cleanly divided blocks. So, I fired up WebStorm, and started writing, with great help from Copilot. The 404 and Home pages I “borrowed” from Minima, with some changes to suit me. The site started with HTML and CSS, but I soon switched to SCSS for its modularity.

The first iteration, however, was heavily criticised for its ugly color theme. So, I got human help, and together, [Micodo] and I created a clean, dark but colored, color scheme.

Then came chaos: I decided to split the theme from the blog, and publish it to RubyGems. My first attempt at using git subtree ended miserably, as moving files does not retain history. In an effort that took an entire afternoon, I rebased my edits onto a copy of the original repository, and meticoulously edited history to make it seem like I had planned this all the time. And finally, it worked: The history now accurately shows the development of my own Jekyll theme.

You can use it too! Simply follow the instructions in its GitHub Repository (or on the Page built from it), and make sure your Page uses a Gem build.

Keynote on iPad is very limited, at least compared to Keynote on Mac. You can edit many style options, but only the Mac version allows you to export them as a theme. This is a thing seen through many apps, both first and third party, where the Mac version is significantly stronger than the iPad version, sometimes for no particular reason (and that’s why Photomator is so cool on iPad, it can do things Photos can only do on Mac).

So, I started creating the theme on Mac. I opened a presentation with the Simple White theme, and pressed cmd+shift+e to edit the slide templates. I opened the jekyl-glass theme in a second window, and created a color swatch for its colors. (for reference, they are #1b2f33 and white). I also added the transparent border and background colors, and also a fixed color version of the background.

More iteration was also done on the various text fields. The “Agenda”, “Quote” and “Facts” slides are unneccssary, I’ve used “Fact” once, and Agenda is just Title and Bullets. However, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to put rounded corners on a text field. The short story is: you can’t. The long story is: you can’t. Paragraph styles can have rounded corners, but the radii are decided by Keynote. For the content of the Bullets slides, I first used pointed corners, but in the end, I just put a rectangle behind the text field, and set it to be behind the text. This is a bit of a hack, but it works. ¹

You will be able to download the theme soon, after I remove the EXIF data from the placeholder images.

And if the code gets longer, you might see your fingers strained. A few months ago, I someway heard of the Neo layout, which is designed to ease typing in both German and English, and also has more layers containing a lot of exotic symbols such as ⊥ (orthogonal to), ⊂ (subset of), ♀♂⚥ (the gender symbols), and the normal and zero width non-breaking spaces. Every one of the six layers also has three deadkeys, and there is a Compose system (on Windows and Linux), allowing you to set basically every Latin-based character.

It is, however, quite different from QWERTY (or QWERTZ, a version of QWERTY enshittified for German typewriters), so it requires a bit of learning, and my method, which I can definitely recommend: Go to a coding camp or hackathon, and write your code with that new layout.

Setting it up on different systems required a varying amount of effort, ranging from Windows (installing a keyboard driver and copying an EXE to shell:startup) to iPad (looking up every single character to create a custom layout in a paid app).

Windows setup

For Windows setup, I just followed the official kbdneo installation instructions, downloading the Bone versions of both kbdneo and ReNeo.

Linux setup

While Neo and Bone are included as keyboard layouts, Neo variants other than Neo2 are hidden away. After a lot of research and giving up, I found that it is simply … de bone. And so I entered that into my Hyprland config, and I saw that it was good.

iOS setup

iOS does not support Neo out of the box like Linux does, nor does it support layout drop-ins like macOS or Windows do. (If you can call copying DLLs to System32 and SysWOW64 and installing a registry patch a drop-in). The Neo manual recommended buying Keybuild (not sponsored), and using their config. But that config is only for Neo2, and only includes Layer 1 (and a bit of 2), so I wrote my own. It works really well on iPad, but the keys are a bit small on iPhone. Layer 4 is a bit cut down, but I did what I could. You can download it here: Keybuild download.

Mac setup

On Mac, the installation instructions have changed recently, and someone made a mistake doing that (edit: My PR fixing the upstream instructions has been merged. The download link now directly leads to the correct file). You need to download a Bundle file containing Neo2, AdNW and Bone. Then, copy that file to a Keyboard Layouts folder, so one of:

• /Library/Keyboard Layouts for all users
• ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts for the current user
• /Network/Library/Keyboard Layouts for network users

Then, log out and log back in, and you should be able to select the layout in System Preferences.

You are not done! Keyboard layouts on Mac can only have 4 layers, so you also need to install Karabiner Elements, and import the Neo project’s ruleset.

Further reading

I got most of my info from the Neo manual, so, if you want to know more, you should read that.

So I took the challenge, but instead of writing a better binary counter, I directly opposed him, standardizing both Advent Wreathes and Calendars in what I call The Advent Progression Tally Protocol, or APT.Pt. That is a backronym, stemming from what appears to be the chorus of Bruno Mars’s new viral hit, APT. (which is pronounced with a Korean accent, apparently standing for “Apartment”)

You can get APT.Pt/1.0 on GitHub Gists. The Gist UI does not show tags yet, but the correct commit is tagged 1.0.

As a side note/view back stage, this post was written on an iPad using Textastic and Working Copy, the latter of which is also included in the Student developer pack. Expect a blog post about my keyboard layout Soon™.

And I’ve already started: Most of this text was written by Copilot, which is already suggesting some more advertising.

See you, maybe soon, on the Interwebz (wow, that sounds cringy).