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.
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.
This is my hello world post to see if everything is working. Actually this is my second hello world, i messed up the source/master separation in the first repo ;)