Text

· · to read

I just watched Corey Haines’ lightning talk from this year’s acts_as_conference:

He makes a lot of really good points in a short amount of time. One of the things he says is that if we have to look at documentation for a technique, we’re unlikely to use that technique when we’re in a time crunch. I think this is a very good point. Another time when I might not use the documentation is when I’m just dabbling.

To learn things, he suggests doing arbitrary tasks repetitively to get them engrained into our minds.

I spent a number of hours doing arbitrary tasks with vim, and I’ve gotten pretty good at using vim IMHO. I wish I could say I was as good at jQuery, but I haven’t got it down as well despite doing real projects in it. I think perhaps it’s best that I pick an arbitrary task, or at least do a real, but small, task repetitively, or keep trying to improve it, until I start to really get the hang of it.

On a side note, Corey Haines’ has quit working a regular job and started traveling around and pair programming with people in exchange for room and board. He calls himself a Software Journeyman. It will be interesting to hear what he learns from the experience. I hope his journey takes him to Arizona at some point!

Text

· · to read

This is just a quick update on how I’m using the enter key in vim. The sticky shift-enter key configuration didn’t work out for me. After pressing shift-enter once, I found that I would press shift-enter again, expecting it to create a newline. I wound up just remapping <CR≫ to <Esc>, and using shift-enter to insert newlines, or pressing enter and then “o” or “O” to create a new line above or below the current line. I use the latter option most. The only time it doesn’t work is when I need to split a line into two. For that I use shift-enter.

Shift-enter doesn’t work when using vim in a terminal, so the remapping doesn’t work quite as well in the terminal. I use it anyway, though. I should remap something to split a line into two, but so far I haven’t. I use vim in the gui (MacVim) most of the time. The couple of times I’ve had to split a line in the command line, I’ve hit:

  • D to delete the rest of the line and yank it
  • o to open a new line
  • Enter to get out of insert mode (since it’s remapped to Esc)
  • p to paste the rest of the line, that I deleted earlier

…which is terrible. If I start using command-line vim more often I’ll add a mapping for it.

This might seem like a pain, but for me it beats reaching for the Esc key. YMMV.

Update: zenzike pointed out in the comments that if you remap CR (the enter key) in the terminal, Control-CR still inserts a newline. So you could use Control-CR to insert a newline if CR was remapped to Esc. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for me in OS X’s terminal or in iTerm by default. It does, however, work in gnome terminal running under Ubuntu on VMWare Fusion. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work in either of the two OS X terminal programs. I would be curious to learn why it doesn’t work and how to fix it, though, as this otherwise a very nice solution.

Text

· · to read

A few weeks ago, I started using vim as my main text editor. Soon after that, I installed the vimperator Firefox extension on my main computer. A few days into the use of these two tools, I was really excited about both of them. It takes more than a few days for me to know whether I’m comfortable with using a particular piece of software regularly, though.

I’m still using vim every day, and I like it. It’s powerful, ergonomic, and customizable. There are a few annoyances. I still haven’t figured out how to properly configure Firefox to use MacVim as an external editor. Vim doesn’t support having multiple frames for a single instance of vim (emacs does). The official wiki, hosted by Wikia, has horrible ads, and I refuse to install an ad blocker, because I don’t want to turn a blind eye to virtual blight like the maintainers of vim have. Nevertheless, I’ve become quite comfortable with vim and will continue using it. While I’d like it much more if it didn’t have these annoyances, it has relatively few annoyances compared to some other editors I’ve tried, and the good things about it outweigh the bad.

My experience with Vimperator was different. As with vim, I really enjoyed using it at first. Over time, though, I found myself growing tired of it, even though it enabled me to browse faster. The biggest problem for me was that the commands only work if I’m in the normal mode, and it’s very easy to get thrown out of the normal mode. The two things that most often put me in the wrong mode were full-page Flash files and JavaScript that placed the focus in text boxes. Another issue was that I couldn’t easily use the keyboard to scroll in a div. I can’t easily do that with normal Firefox either, but Vimperator is supposed to make browsing with the keyboard easy, and it does it for the most part.

I uninstalled vimperator, but I miss its functionality. I’d like a lightweight extension that makes it easy to click links or jump between form fields with the keyboard. I don’t think that the vim input model is suitable for keyboard navigation within a browser, because the browser environment is too unpredictable. I’d like to see a couple of multi-key combinations that activate keyboard input, though. These would work inside of text fields. Flash would probably still break them some of the time, but to deal with that I could install FlashBlock.

I really enjoy trying out new development tools. I think the next thing I’ll try out is a visual CSS editor. Any suggestions?