Tooling

I’ve been using, teaching, and stanning Vim since almost the beginning of my programming career. Yet, when asked to explain this preference, I stumble. In this post, I’d like to explore why I love Vim. ...

Any command you type out manually, or even tab-complete a few times, can be shortened. A common shortening technique is the terminal alias. Here are some tips that help me write better aliases and cut my terminal keystrokes. ...

Open a production Ruby file, and you’ll often see this magic comment at the top. # frozen_string_literal: true Today I’d like to argue that most Ruby files do not need this comment. YAGNI— You Aren’t Going to Need It. ...

The import statements at the top of a JavaScript component file can be a confusing, duplicative, churning mess. Is there a way to organize them that makes sense and scales? In this post, I’d like to share the way I handle this detail. ...

I love Vim. Folks who’ve programmed with me, or attended a Vim Meetup when I was an organizer, can attest. When I was learning to code, getting fast at Vim changed everything for me. After almost a decade using this editor, here are my personal configurations. ...

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out, adding non-recursive Vim mappings to vim-termbux. ...

After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between keyword, match, and region following syn in a Vim syntax highlighting file. Here’s my answer. ...

A few weeks back I tackled the following programming challenge from my colleague Josh Branchaud: Vim Buffer I open up a new Vim buffer and type all the numbers 1 to 10,000, separated by spaces. Then, my cat walks on the keyboard and somehow activates a substitution command that replaces all the ‘0’ digits (zeros) with spaces. If I now sum up all the numbers in the buffer, as delineated by spaces, what is the total? ...