About a year ago I wrote about the first step in de-Bootstrapping my website, where I made my site layout independent of the Bootstrap CSS framework. I have now finally removed Bootstrap entirely from the website.
Sometimes you want to have a set of Vim settings specific only to a certain project. There are many tips out there how to achieve such a setup, but most of them expose the user to serious security risks. I am going to describe the fundamental problem and how to solve it. TL;DR: use the vim-addon-local-vimrc plugin.
My article for the website Learn X in Y minutes about Vim scripting has been accepted; the article teaches you how to get started with Vim's built-in custom scripting language in a very concise manner. It has been quite an enjoyable topic to write about and I even ended up learning a few new tricks myself.
I have recently switched my Neovim setup to use lightline.vim and at the same time I was experimenting with colour schemes. Getting lightline to switch colours along with the rest of the editor is non-trivial, but I think I have figured it out, so I am going to share my setup.
When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have gotten so used to metaprogramming in Lisp that they seem to forget that it is either an entirely alien concept to people, or something people have been burned by too often (like every C programmer).
When I first learned about rotation matrices they appeared quite “magic”; if you squinted your eyes a bit it sort of made sense, and if you did the math you could prove that the matrix does indeed perform the rotation and that all the group properties are met, but none of that explains where that form comes from, why it works. In this blog post I will explore a way to derive the formula for rotation matrices step by step. If you wish to follow along you need only basic knowledge of linear algebra and trigonometry.
Vim has good support for Scheme, but the problem with Scheme is that every implementation adds its own features to the language. My guile.vim plugin aims to improve support for GNU Guile by augmenting these settings. It can attempt to detect when a Scheme file is Guile-specific and it adds syntax highlighting for Guile-specific forms.
I use GitLab to host my various projects, but it is always a good idea to be able to have an automatic mirror set up. It adds redundancy in case something goes wrong with GitLab, and having a mirror on a popular site like GitHub allows people to file issues without signing up for a less popular service. I am writing this down for myself so I don't have to figure out how to set up a mirror every time anew. This was written for GitLab version 12.0.0.
In order to make writing Awk scripts easier I have written a new Neovim plugin: Awk-ward.nvim (GitHub mirror). This plugins allows you to edit an Awk script or its input, and see the output live as you are making changes.
When I wrote guile-messagepack I needed an object to represent the nil
value, which embodies the concept of "nothingness" or "no value" in
MessagePack. None of the existing objects like #f or '() were adequate,
so I decided to make a new one: nothing. It does not make sense for there to
be multiple instance of nothing, so it had to be a singleton. In this blog
post I will describe a way of creating such a singleton.