A couple of days ago I had to make a documents/folder structure for an app. The idea was that there’s two types of objects: categories and documents, the user can click through categories and download documents. A category can contain other categories and documents. We only had to show the category the user is currently in, the files and categories that are in that category and some way to navigate one level higher. So there was no need to see children’s children etc.

Writings blog posts with Vim is awesome! Obviously, if I thought otherwise I wouldn’t currently be writing this in Vim. Writing posts on my local machine works perfectly for me as interruptions aren’t as big of a problem as they would be when I’d be writing in some textarea online. I can just close the file, pick up whatever is interrupting me and continue whenever I want. Another nice thing is that I often write posts while traveling by public transport and writing the posts on my local machine means I don’t have to rely on the internet the public transport offers (which actually isn’t too bad in the Netherlands). Another thing that blogging in Vim makes possible is that you can just open a single terminal screen, set it to fullscreen and write without any distractions.

When navigating through Vim you’ll search a lot using the / command, which works ‘ok’ by default but there’s a couple of settings you can make to increase Vims search functionality a lot.

I spend most of my time working on two systems, a desktop at work and a laptop at home. As I spend a lot of that time in the terminal I’ve setup some things to make sure my shell works exactly the same on both systems.

Once you’ve installed Vim(didn’t install it yet? check out this blogpost) it’s time to setup your configuration file, where the Vim magic happens. Vim configurations are different for each developer, you start out with a blank configuration file, or maybe with a copy of a vimrc of a developer you know and over the years as you grow as a developer your vimrc will grow with you.

I’ve started using Vim about a year ago, so I’m definitely not an experienced user. But along the way I’ve learned some neat tricks which I would like to share with you.

Earlier today I decided to switch from Postgres.app to a simple homebrew install of postgresql. Not because I’m not satisfied with the app but I think it’s just a bit overkill to start up a database. Together with the lunchy gem (a launchctl wrapper) I found yesterday switching should be a piece of cake. So I threw Postgres.app in the trashbin. Entered brew install postgresql and everything was supposed to be unicorns and rainbows.

My contract says Developer which might sound a bit allround but up until recently 95% of the development I did was Ruby on Rails. With a rare sidestep to Actionscript, Objective-C, Coffeescript, plain Ruby and more. I’ve always wanted to do some more Objective-C and in my spare time I’ve made one or two apps in the past (actually one finished and about 10 started but never finished ;)) But I believe the only way to learn something properly is by doing it 40 hours a week. So a couple of weeks ago I’ve finally had the luck that we (Wirelab) got an Objective-C job and it was quiet enough for me to focus on picking up Objective-C and building the app.

As I’m a Ruby developer and more specifically a Rails developer I’m quite a lazy developer. When I run into a problem more often then not there’s a gem to solve it for me or there’s a blog that explains step by step how to solve it. Rarely I spend days or even hours on a single problem anymore.

Up until not too long ago I barely used the terminal, I used it when absolutely necessary but whenever it was possible I immediately switch to a GUI for whatever I was doing. After reading yet another “Why Vim is awesome” blog I decided to make the switch from Textmate to Vim. And once I was editing in Vim I noticed that I was more productive by just fullscreening my terminal and staying in the terminal as much as possible. Without continuously switching between my mouse and keyboard I got faster and faster at the stuff I do most of my day: coding and everything related to it. Since then I’ve been trying to optimize my work flow as much as possible.

Over the years I tried blogging a couple of times. However for some reason I never seemed able to get some rhythm in it, to keep blogging. The last article on this blog is well over a year old. And the day I wrote it I was sure it was the first of many more to come. The post got some traction on Hacker News and I got some great feedback. However the article was a rant, and rants always seem to get traction, and are the easiest to write.