text editors

Vim tweaks and updates

Over the last few weeks, I have significantly changed and updated my Vim configuration. I’ve been using the editor for decades, and yet I every time I revisit my setup, I am amazed at how far the editor progressed and how wisdom the Vim community shares via themes, plugins, configuration tweaks, etc.

Here are some of the highlights this time around:

Switched from Pathogen plugin manager (and Ansible bits) to Vundle.
Added vim-devicons plugin and a patched font that supports them.
Switched from Syntastic to ALE for faster and better syntax checks.
Improved the code completion configuration, tags, and such.
Added a whole bunch of plugins for developers.

I am still getting used to some new shortcuts, catching up on the documentation, and trying things out. But if it’s been a while since you’ve looked at your own Vim configuration, I suggest you do so. Things are moving and evolving faster than you might think.

Gmail autocomplete

As somebody who spends a lot of time in the text editor, working with code, and on the Linux command line, I see text autocomplete as one of the basic, native functionality. It’s almost like copy-paste, selection, and undo.

Gmail has recently extended the Smart Compose feature with exactly that. No longer it only covers the pre-defined responses like “OK, thanks” and “No problem”. It completes pretty much any words and phrases that you type.

It’s super useful and it makes me wonder why it took so long for somebody to think of this. Surely, the actual implementation is not all that complex (just kidding … it’s not a simple dictionary complete, it’s context aware and smart, so, yeah, it’s pretty complex).

commandlinefu – a place to share and gather command line wisdom

commandlinefu is a place to learn and share your knowledge about command line tools and techniques. It has thousands of tips, tricks, and handy shortcuts, covering a wide range of tools from shells and editors to version control and remote access.

Windows Notepad Finally Supports Unix, Mac OS Line Endings

This Slashdot story links to this blog post by Microsoft. 33 years later, one of the most annoying issues with the Notepad text editor is resolved:

Starting with the current Windows 10 Insider build, Notepad will support Unix/Linux line endings (LF), Macintosh line endings (CR), and Windows Line endings (CRLF) as usual. New files created within Notepad will use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default, but it will now be possible to view, edit, and print existing files, correctly maintaining the file’s current line ending format.

They shouldn’t have invented their own line ending in the first place. But it’s great to see that they finally acknowledge the existence of the rest of the world.

Vim, cfdo, Ale and RipGrep

This blog post goes over several grep-like tools and their integration with Vim. If that’s something you do often, it’s worth a read. The tools are:

Vim’s built-in “:cdo” and “:cfdo” commands. Here’s another blog post with a nice explanation of what these are and how to use them.
Ale – asynchronous lint engine.
RipGrep – a very fast tool for recursively searching directories for a regular expression. Extra bits for Vim integration are provided by the vim-ripgrep plugin.