Software projects, various thoughts and ramblingshttps://hiphish.github.io/enAstrohttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/05/01/github-does-not-have-to-be-our-only-forge/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/05/01/github-does-not-have-to-be-our-only-forge/I had moved off GitHub back before it was cool, but recently more and more Free and Open Source projects have been migrating off GitHub as well, and with how much of a shitshow the entire service has become I cannot see why anyone would trust the platform at all anymore. Actually no, I do know one reason: its user base. Pretty much everyone is on GitHub. For all its flaws, GitHub is still solving this one major social problem. I am here to give you the good news that you can get the best of both worlds: move off GitHub and still benefit from its social inertia.Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcegithttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/04/30/separation-of-content-and-presentation-in-tailwind/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/04/30/separation-of-content-and-presentation-in-tailwind/Every Tailwind example I have ever seen uses inline styling by applying Tailwind utility classes directly to the element. Even the Tailwind website advertises this feature. It was what kept me from trying out Tailwind for years. Eventually I decided to at least give it a try, and I found out that you can indeed separate your presentation from the content with Tailwind.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTmiscwebcsshttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/04/29/switching-to-astro/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2026/04/29/switching-to-astro/I really, really did not want to do this, but I have rewritten this website again from scratch. This time I’m going all in on the JavaScript ecosystem: TypeScript, Tailwind and Astro. And no, I’m not kidding.Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtmlwebjavascripthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2025/07/22/stop-killing-games/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2025/07/22/stop-killing-games/TL;DR: If you are an EU citizen (not merely a resident) you can sign the Stop Killing Games EU initiative. This is not your typical open letter, this is a government-level initiative that will need to be discussed if it passes. At the moment we have way more than the required million signatures, but we do not know how many of these are fraudulent and might get tossed out. Keep on signing! There are less than ten days left, so don’t put if off. Now for those who don’t know what any of this means, I’ll do my best to elaborate.Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTmiscgamesranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2025/03/24/beware-of-implicit-require-in-neovim-plugins/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2025/03/24/beware-of-implicit-require-in-neovim-plugins/Recently I tagged version 0.9.1 of rainbow-delimiters.nvim. This update got rid of one really nasty mistake I had been dragging along from the very beginning until just recently: every time you started up Neovim a number of require calls would run even if you never called require a single time yourself. In this post I would like to go over how this happened, why it is bad and how I got rid of it. Even though I am using rainbow-delimiters as an example here, everything I am about to say applies to other plugins as well.Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMTvimneovimluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/09/22/introducing-nvim-busted-shims/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/09/22/introducing-nvim-busted-shims/I have written in the past about testing Neovim plugins with busted. In that post I outlined how to use a thin command-line wrapper shell script around Neovim to use Neovim as a Lua interpreter and how to configure busted to use it as the Lua interpreter to run tests in. In order to avoid having to copy-paste that snippet over and over again I have created a standalone repository for the shim: nvim-busted-shims (GitHub mirror).Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimtestingvimluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/08/25/lets-write-fizzbuzz-in-functional-style/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/08/25/lets-write-fizzbuzz-in-functional-style/Let’s write yet another FizzBuzz because that’s what the world needs. Here’s the twist though: ours won’t be like those other fuddy-duddy lame and bloated enterprise-grade FizzBuzzes. Oh no, we are ahead of the curve this time, it’s functional time, baby! We will be using Python though, because Python and Javascript is the closest most of us will ever get to using a functional programming language in production.Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMTpythonfunctional programminghttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/08/15/testing-fennel-with-busted-in-lua/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/08/15/testing-fennel-with-busted-in-lua/Fennel is a Lisp-like language which compiles down to Lua, so it should be possible to test Fennel scripts in busted. Indeed, we can, but there are a few points to note about testing Fennel code in Lua.Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimlualisptestinghttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/29/introducing-neotest-busted/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/29/introducing-neotest-busted/The conclusion of the Neovim & Busted testing sage is coming to a close with this new plugin: neotest-busted (GitHub mirror). In my previous post I mentioned that that I wanted to write a Neotest adapter for the busted test framework, so here it is.Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimvimtestinghttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/20/debugging-lua-scripts-running-in-neovim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/20/debugging-lua-scripts-running-in-neovim/In a previous blog post I wrote about testing Lua scripts in Neovim using the busted test framework. Today I want to look at how to debug Lua scripts in Neovim using the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP). Just as before with busted, our problem is that we need to use Neovim as our Lua interpreter because we want to use Neovim’s Lua API. At the same time, the debug adapter expects the Lua interpreter to conform to Lua’s command-line interface. That’s right: we need another command-line interface adapter.Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimvimluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/15/writing-a-ring-buffer-tdd-style/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/15/writing-a-ring-buffer-tdd-style/Let’s write a ring buffer in Python! OK, that’s not particularly exciting. Let’s use test-drivent development, that should make things a bit more interesting. In this blog post I will go over the individual steps and my train of thought, because TDD requires a certain discipline and mindset. Why a ring buffer? A ring buffer is not quite trivial to implement because it has a couple of edge cases, but at the same time it is not hard to implement either. This is a post to follow along at home, so grab your text editor and let’s get going.Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMTmiscpythonhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/01/introducing-yo-dawg-nvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/02/01/introducing-yo-dawg-nvim/Yo dawg, I heard you like Neovim, so I put a Neovim inside your Neovim, so you can edit while you edit! Ahem… anyway, in my previous post I proposed a plugin which would make it easier to control an embedded Neovim from within Neovim. So I went ahead and wrote yo-dawg.nvim (GitHub mirror), named after the “Yo dawg” internet meme.Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimneovimluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/01/29/testing-neovim-plugins-with-busted/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2024/01/29/testing-neovim-plugins-with-busted/The most annoying part about writing plugins for Neovim has been the lack of a good test framework. There are a couple of frameworks, and Vader has been my favourite so far, but they all have their downsides. This made me wonder: why limit myself to Vim/Neovim test frameworks? We have a full Lua runtime, and other people already have solved the testing problem for Lua. Busted does 90% of what we need, so let’s fill in the remaining 10%. The following is based on my experience with adding tests to rainbow-delimiters.nvim.Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMTvimneovimluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/12/24/rainbow-delimiters-030-released/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/12/24/rainbow-delimiters-030-released/I have just published version 0.3.0 of rainbow-delimiters.nvim (GitHub mirror). This update brings in a number of the usual improvements to to queries and strategies, but more importantly it also makes configuration at runtime more flexible, but most importantly in light of the current date it also includes a fun little Christmas-themed strategy.Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/11/12/big-change-to-rainbow-delimiters-nvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/11/12/big-change-to-rainbow-delimiters-nvim/No, not another rewrite. Much better than that: the long-standing ugliness of highlighting being limited to only one node at a time has been fixed. Previously only one opening node and one closing node could be highlighted. This was perfectly adequate for most languages where you have one opening parenthesis and one closing parenthesis. However, consider HTML: we want to highlight the opening and closing tag, but if we highlight the entire top-level node we also highlight the attributes of the tag, which looks too vibrant. The alternative was highlighting the tag name, but this left the angle brackets without highlighting, which looked jarring as well.Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains FUTO’s reason behind the custom license, and while I do agree with their reason, I strong disagree with their method. In this post I will explain what Open Source means, how Grayjay does not meet the criteria, why this is an issue, and how it can be solved.Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/09/29/free-software-is-necessary-but-not-sufficient/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/09/29/free-software-is-necessary-but-not-sufficient/Recently Unity announced changes to their pricing model (archive) which have been very poorly received by their users, to put it gently. They have since backtracked (archive2) somewhat, but at this point it would not matter even if they completely scrapped their plans and went back to how things used to be. The trust has been broken and many game developers are waking up to the fact that Unity is effectively holding their project hostage. Switching from one engine to another is akin to a full rewrite, and depending on the size and progress of the project porting might not be a feasible thing to do.Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcerantunity3dhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/07/13/introducing-rainbow-delimiters-nvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/07/13/introducing-rainbow-delimiters-nvim/Wait what, again? Yes, another rainbow delimiter plugin, a fork of a fork. The previous one nvim-ts-rainbow2 was built as a module for nvim-treesitter because that is what the original plugin did and what everyone else was doing. However, nvim-treesitter is deprecating the module system. This means nvim-ts-rainbow2 will eventually stop working, so we will need a new rainbow plugin sooner or later anyway.Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/06/10/free-software-is-important-for-non-progammers-as-well/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/06/10/free-software-is-important-for-non-progammers-as-well/Free Software is software which respects the user’s freedom. The Four Freedoms ensure that users can run the program for any purpose, study the source code, modify the source, share the software and share modifications of the software. However, what if you are not a programmer? Does this mean Free Software only adds value to people who know how to program, and if you are a non-programmer you might as well use proprietary software? Is it all just the same then? No. In this post I will try to illustrate why Free Software matters even to non-programmers.Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/05/21/the-game-modding-scene-has-a-source-code-problem/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/05/21/the-game-modding-scene-has-a-source-code-problem/Sometimes I like to play video games. Sometimes these games have issues, or they can be improved upon. Sometimes these issues are so severe that the game is virtually (or even literally) unplayable. Fortunately some really smart people have done a fantastic job reverse-engineering parts of these games, their file formats, or found workarounds for engine limitations. Unfortunately too often that knowledge never gets written down and just keeps rotting in someone’s head.Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 GMTmiscgamesranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/04/28/i-have-a-github-sponsor-page-now/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/04/28/i-have-a-github-sponsor-page-now/I have decided to open up a GitHub sponsor page. Recently I released the Neovim plugin nvim-ts-rainbow2, which has garnered a lot of stars, so I figured I might as well try this sponsor thing. There is also a Monero wallet for those who prefer to forgo the middle-man.Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/04/05/resolution-patcher-for-anno-1503/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/04/05/resolution-patcher-for-anno-1503/I have written a small Python script which patches the game files of Anno 1503 to run at higher resolutions. There is already a widescreen patch out there ready to use, so why create a patcher? Download links die, knowledge gets forgotten and people lose interest and move on. Without preservation of knowledge the patch will be lost and impossible to reproduce without trial and error all over again. My patcher exists both to be useful, and as executable documentation for posterity. There is also the possibility that if you patch the DLL file that came with your own game instead of using someone else’s it might run more stable (not all builds of the game are identical), but that’s just a blind guess.Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMTgameshttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/03/02/introducing-nvim-ts-rainbow2/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/03/02/introducing-nvim-ts-rainbow2/Two months in the making, it is time to finally release my new Neovim plugin officially: nvim-ts-rainbow2 (GitHub mirror). This plugin uses Neovim’s built-in Tree-sitter support to add alternating highlighting to delimiters. This is usually known as “rainbow parentheses”, but thanks to Tree-sitter we are not limited to parentheses, we can match any kind of delimiter, such as tags in HTML or begin/end blocks in some programming languages.Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/02/26/how-i-switch-colours-in-alacritty/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/02/26/how-i-switch-colours-in-alacritty/My current terminal emulator is Alacritty. One thing I would like is a way to change the colours while the terminal is running. The only way to do so is the edit the configuration file, but doing so by hand can be annoying. There are some scripts out there that let you do it automatically, but all that I have found rely on bloated stuff like having Node.js installed. We can do better by using just what we already have on Unix out of the box.Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelinuxterminalhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/12/31/using-github-without-workflow-lockin/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/12/31/using-github-without-workflow-lockin/Git is a decentralized version control system, meaning that there is no one superior repository. Every single copy of a Git repository is just as complete as any other. Of course we can pick one particular repository and declare it to be the one source of truth, the “upstream” repository. Usually this upstream repository is then hosted on some server, and if we are interested in openness and collaboration this server is part of a larger web service, called a “forge”. Out of these forges GitHub is perhaps the most popular one. Unfortunately this means if we are interested in contributions we have to make the GitHub repo our upstream and use its web services and web UI for our workflow. At least that is the common wisdom, but it does not have to be that way.Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMTorganisationrantgithttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/12/30/a-filesystem-abstraction-for-hssg/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/12/30/a-filesystem-abstraction-for-hssg/A while ago I announced my new pet project HSSG, the hackable static site generator. The final step of generating a web site is writing the actual files to the file system of the operating system. So far this has been a messy affair where information about file paths had to be dragged through the entire chain from start to finish. This was ugly, hard to maintain and it muddied the layers of abstraction. In this post I will explain how I brought order to HSSG through a file system abstraction.Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelisphtmlwebhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/11/29/what-even-is-user-friendly/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/11/29/what-even-is-user-friendly/The term “user-friendly” gets thrown around often, but what does it even mean to be “user-friendly”? Clearly we can say that something is more user-friendly the fewer defects it has. But beyond that? Is a GUI application more user-friendly than a text-based application? Is a lower learning curve more user-friendly than a steep learning curve? Is a product which has many features built-in more user friendly than a barebones product or an extensible product?Tue, 29 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMTmiscranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/11/22/introducing-nvim-cmp-vlime/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/11/22/introducing-nvim-cmp-vlime/I am glad to announce a new Neovim plugin: nvim-cmp-vlime (GitHub mirror). It is a completion source for nvim-cmp which uses the Vlime plugin to fetch completion candidates from a running Common Lisp process. Vlime is a plugin similar to Slime for Emacs, it lets the editor communicate with a running Lisp process so we can evaluate code at runtime, debug, inspect values, and of course get auto-completion. In fact, Vlime uses the same Backend, Swank, as Slime, so the results should be equally good.Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelispvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/10/16/cl-cmark-approaching-stable/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/10/16/cl-cmark-approaching-stable/In June of this year I introduced my Common Lisp library cl-cmark (GitHub mirror), which implements parsing [CommonMark] documents and manipulating the resulting document tree. I have been hammering out the last kinks over the past weeks and I am now ready to call it done. Before I officially put the 1.0 stamp on it though I would like if a few more people could take a look at the library and give it a try.Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelispmarkdownhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/10/02/a-new-static-site-generator/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/10/02/a-new-static-site-generator/In January 2019 I switched the static site generator for this website from Pelican to a custom one written in GNU Guile. Most (or all?) static site generators out there have an opinion on what a website should be made of. You might have full control over the layout and content of individual pages, but not so much over how the web site itself is composed. Writing my own static site generator freed me from these constraints. Now if I want to have sub-sites and multiple blogs I can do so. However, the custom generator was suffering from the same problem: it had one specific web site composition in mind, it just happened that this time it fit my needs. That is why I have created HSSG: the Hackable Static Site Generator.Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMTorganisationlisphtmlwebhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/25/playing-civ3-in-wine-in-2022/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/25/playing-civ3-in-wine-in-2022/A few days ago I wanted to re-install Sid Meier’s Civilization III on my machine and play it again. This blog post is a summary of the tricks I had to use to make it work it work well; I am writing it down for posterity, maybe someone else will find it useful. That someone might even be future me.Sat, 25 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMTmiscwinegameshttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/15/introducing-cl-cmark/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/15/introducing-cl-cmark/For the past few weeks I have been working on a little side project, a library of Common Lisp bindings to cmark, the CommonMark reference implementation: cl-cmark (GitHub mirror). CommonMark is a dialect of Markdown which aims to remove any ambiguity, clean up the language specification and provide a common dialect of Markdown for other projects to use. The cmark library is the reference implementation for parsing CommonMark. It is written in C, so creating bindings for other language is fairly simple.Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelispmarkdownhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/12/fake-web-backend-with-mitmproxy/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/06/12/fake-web-backend-with-mitmproxy/A web application typically consists of three layers: the frontend, the backend, and some sort of database system for persistence. While developing the frontend we often need to send messages to the backend, receive some response and process that response. Faking backends in automated tests is a solved problem, but sometime we don’t want to write tests, we want to wildly experiment with various inputs as we are trying out the frontend by hand. We want to intercept messages and look into what is being transmitted. In this post I will demonstrate a simple fake backend using the mitmproxy application.Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcewebnetworkhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/04/07/the-problem-with-contributing-to-open-source/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/04/07/the-problem-with-contributing-to-open-source/I love Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (FLOSS); not only does the software respect your personal freedom, you can also contribute back to make it better. It becomes a communal cooperative effort. But just because you can contribute, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/03/19/securing-quicklisp-through-mitmproxy/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/03/19/securing-quicklisp-through-mitmproxy/Quicklisp is a popular systems manager for Common Lisp, it allows users to download, install, update and uninstall Common Lisp systems (what other language call packages, but that term already means something else in Common Lisp). However, Quicklisp has one glaring security issue: it downloads everything through HTTP. This means every time you use Quicklisp to download a system you open yourself up for a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. We can use a local proxy server to route all traffic to Quicklisp through HTTPS, and in this blog post I will illustrate how to achieve this using mitmproxy.Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcelispwebnetworkhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/03/15/lua-metatables-for-neovim-plugin-settings/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/03/15/lua-metatables-for-neovim-plugin-settings/A lot of new Neovim plugins come with a setup function which lets you specify the settings of the plugin. Users are expected to call that function with a table as arguments which contains the user’s personal settings to override the defaults. This works, but Lua is all about tables, so let’s look at an alternative.Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMTvimneovimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/01/08/subservience-to-the-algorithm/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2022/01/08/subservience-to-the-algorithm/Over the last couple of years I have been noticing two trends among internet videos, especially on YouTube: videos that could easily be three to four minutes long are stretched to over ten minutes in length, and thumbnails where people are making stupid faces. This comes from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm favouring thumbnails with people’s faces, and videos needing to be at least ten minutes long to be eligible for advertising revenue. At least those used to be the rules back then, they might have changed since, but the videos still follow the same pattern.Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMTranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/12/05/managing-vim-plugins-without-plugin-manager/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/12/05/managing-vim-plugins-without-plugin-manager/Recently I have switched my Neovim setup to using the new native Vim package system directly instead of relying on a plugin manager. I had to use Git submodules for another project anyway, so I figured I could combine them with Vim packages and see how that might work out. It is actually working pretty well, to the point where I don’t think that I will be returning to plugin managers for the foreseeable future.Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/10/11/getting-unity-hub-3-working-on-gnu-linux/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/10/11/getting-unity-hub-3-working-on-gnu-linux/Recently I had the misfortune of a data loss, so I had to re-instally my OS again. But even worse: I also had to re-install Unity on GNU/Linux, which has been an exercise in frustration and trial & error. In this post I will outline what I had to do, in the hope that it will be of use to other people.Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMTmisclinuxranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/07/11/generating-unity3d-project-files-on-linux/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/07/11/generating-unity3d-project-files-on-linux/When I develop Grid Framework I need Unity3D to generate project files for Omnisharp to pick up in order to provide me with tooling like auto-completion, linting and refactoring support. Normally doing so requires me to have VSCode installed, but there is a simple way to trick Unity into generating those files anyway.Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMTmisclinuxranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/02/28/running-mongodb-from-guix/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/02/28/running-mongodb-from-guix/I have been watching a tutorial on GraphQL recently (YouTube link) where the lecturer uses MongoDB for persistent storage. He instructs viewers to sign up for a service that hosts a database, but I wanted to run a local instance on my machine instead. MongoDB is not available in the Void repos, but fortunately it is available in the Guix repos. However, running the Mongo deamon requires a little tweak first.Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMTmisclinuxguixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/02/15/pipe-operator-for-lua/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2021/02/15/pipe-operator-for-lua/I have recently been getting into Elixir, and one nice feature it has is the pipe operator. It allows us to express a pipeline of function through which an object will be dragged. This got me thinking: with how flexible Lua is, would it be possible to add something similar to Lua as well?Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceluaelixirhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/31/spreading-tables-in-lua/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/31/spreading-tables-in-lua/Javascript has a spreading operator which lets us splice the contents of an object or array into another object or array. This makes it very easy to create an object based on another object and override or add entries. Since Lua and Javascript are quite similar, wouldn’t it be nice to have this operator in Lua as well? Lua is a minimal language, so adding a new operator seems unlikely, but Lua is also very flexible, and we can add a spreading function instead.Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/29/making-luarocks-xdg-compliant/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/29/making-luarocks-xdg-compliant/LuaRocks is a community-driven package manager for the Lua programming language. LuaRocks packages can be installed globally or in the user’s home directory, but sadly LuaRocks does not follow the XDG Base Directory specification. However, with a few lines of Lua code we can fix this shortcoming partially at least.Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceunixluahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/28/making-sbcl-xdg-compliant/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/28/making-sbcl-xdg-compliant/The war on dotfiles continues, this time with SBCL. Let’s see how we can make it comply with the XDG Base Directory specification.Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceunixlisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/27/making-bash-xdg-compliant/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/12/27/making-bash-xdg-compliant/GNU Bash does not comply with the XDG Base Directory specification, it uses the classical dotfiles approach where it just dumps all its files into the home directory. It does not even have the courtesy of putting all its files in one common ~/.bash directory. Fortunately we can coerce Bash into compliance with a bit of effort.Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/11/20/guix-daemon-for-runit/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/11/20/guix-daemon-for-runit/I use GNU Guix as a secondary package manager on my system. Previously I have been running Kubuntu, which uses systemd as its init system, but I have since switched to Void, which uses runit. Guix comes with services for systemd and Upstart included, but not for runit. Let’s find out how to create a runit service from scratch.Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceguixlinuxhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/11/15/my-computer-broke-down/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/11/15/my-computer-broke-down/There are two types of people: those who make backups and those who will experience a system breakdown. Fortunately I was in the former category, but it was still a very tedious and stressful experience. Every problem is also an opportunity to grow and throw off dead weight, so I used the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and switch my operating system.Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMTorganisationrantunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/10/02/page-template-dsl-for-my-website/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/10/02/page-template-dsl-for-my-website/In my previous blog post I presented how I had come up with an embedded domain-specific language for creating web pages in my custom static site generator. I also mentioned the concept of “templates” in passing. Of course it was only logical to follow the page DSL up with a custom template DSL to smooth over the code duplication and pattern repetition.Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMTorganisationlisphtmlhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/09/28/page-dsl-for-my-website/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/09/28/page-dsl-for-my-website/I got bitten by the Lisp bug recently again, and so I decided to clean up an ugly wart in my static site generator which I use for generating the Workshop. The goal was to create an embedded domain-specific language (DSL) for defining web pages.Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMTorganisationlisphtmlhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/08/30/dotfiles-were-a-mistake/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/08/30/dotfiles-were-a-mistake/Unix has a clever trick for hiding a file from being displayed by the ls command or other file browsers: just prefix the file name with a period character. Many applications use this fact in order to place hidden files or directories in the user’s home directory, usually containing settings, cached files, persistent data and whatever else developers might come up with. This practice has always struck me as just plain wrong, and I am glad that my sentiment was confirmed by Rob Pike years ago.Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/08/02/the-best-language-to-learn-programming/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/08/02/the-best-language-to-learn-programming/What is the best first language when learning how to program? There have been many opinions over the years, each with their own selling point: BASIC was created for beginners, Python is executable pseudocode, JavaScript runs everywhere on the web, and so on. However, I would argue that the truly best language has been right under our nose the whole time: the Unix shell.Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/05/31/macho-man-command-on-steroids/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/05/31/macho-man-command-on-steroids/The Unix man command can open a manual page if you know its name, and the apropos command can search through the manuals if you are looking for a specific word. Let’s put the two to work together into a command I like to call macho: the man command on steroids.Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/05/23/how-i-manage-ssh-connections/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/05/23/how-i-manage-ssh-connections/I have a number of machines I need to connect to via the secure shell (SSH), and typing in the IP address or host name by hand every time get tedious very quickly. I could use an application for that, but that’s bloat. Let’s instead see how we can leverage small universal tools to build an elegant solution of our own instead.Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourceunixhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/29/de-bootsrapping-the-workshop-part-2/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/29/de-bootsrapping-the-workshop-part-2/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.Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtmlranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/08/project-local-vim-settings-the-right-way/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/08/project-local-vim-settings-the-right-way/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.Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMTvimvimranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/01/learn-vimscript-in-y-minutes/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2020/02/01/learn-vimscript-in-y-minutes/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.Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/09/21/switching-automatically-themes-in-lightline/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/09/21/switching-automatically-themes-in-lightline/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.Sat, 21 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/22/what-is-a-programmable-programming-language/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/22/what-is-a-programmable-programming-language/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).Sat, 22 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMTmisclisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/20/understanding-rotation-matrices/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/20/understanding-rotation-matrices/When I first a^2 + b^2 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.Thu, 20 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMTmathhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/17/introducing-guile-vim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/17/introducing-guile-vim/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.Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimlispvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/11/mirroring-a-gitlab-repository/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/11/mirroring-a-gitlab-repository/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.Tue, 11 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/07/introducing-awk-ward-nvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/06/07/introducing-awk-ward-nvim/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.Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimawkhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/05/24/singleton-objects-in-guile-scheme/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/05/24/singleton-objects-in-guile-scheme/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.Fri, 24 May 2019 00:00:00 GMTlisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/05/10/writing-ncm2-sources/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/05/10/writing-ncm2-sources/NCM2 is a plugin for Neovim and Vim which provides users with a unified completion menu. By default it displays nothing, users need to add sources for completion. These plugins instruct NCM2 on how to get completion candidates for a particular use-case, such as words in the current buffer, or function names in a programming language. The NCM2 documentation explains how to write the individual pieces of a source, and in this blog post I am going to dive into how to connect those pieces into a working source.Fri, 10 May 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/03/24/introducing-ncm2-vlime/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/03/24/introducing-ncm2-vlime/I have written a Common Lisp completion source for NCM2, built upon Vlime. It provides asynchronous Common Lisp completion and should work in both Vim and Neovim, depending on how well NCM2 and Vlime themselves work.Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimvimlisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/15/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt3/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/15/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt3/In the previous article we have seen how to pack an object, this time we will see how to unpack it again on the receiving end.Fri, 15 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcemsgpacklisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/13/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt2/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/13/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt2/In this part of the series I want to go into how to pack data to bytes in MessagePack. We will see how to dynamically dispatch on type and how to pack a selection of particular types.Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcemsgpacklisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/11/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt1/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/11/implementing-msgpackrkt-pt1/When I originally set out to write MsgPack.rkt, a Racket implementation of the MessagePack protocol, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around where to begin. I had no experience in writing a serialisation library, and reading the source code of existing implementations only revealed the what, but not the why. This is why I’m starting this short mini-series of blog posts to provide a commentary on my implementation. I hope that it will serve other people who are looking for a starting point to their own implementations.Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcemsgpacklisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/04/de-bootstrapping-part-1/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/02/04/de-bootstrapping-part-1/The first major step in phasing out the bloat that is Bootstrap from my website is done. None of the layout depends on any Bootstrap classes and markup. Instead, the layout is built from scratch using the new Flexbox and Grid features.Mon, 04 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtmlhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/28/pure-html-css-menubar/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/28/pure-html-css-menubar/In the process of de-Bootstrapping the workshop I have to replace whole components provided by Bootstrap with my own constructs. The menu bar is one of the larger components I use, it’s fairly complex and requires a lot of non-semantic markup to get working. In this blog post I will describe step by step how I built mine, which requires less markup and does not rely on Javascript. You can try the demo to see what we are going for (please resize your window to see the responsiveness).Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtmlhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/21/neovim-guix-channel/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/21/neovim-guix-channel/I have set up a channel for GNU Guix to build Neovim. This channel serves as an experimental staging ground for porting Neovim (and perhaps other related projects in the future) to the Guix functional package manager. When the packages are deemed stable and correct enough they will be submitted to Guix proper.Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimlispvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/17/quicklispnvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/17/quicklispnvim/One of the new features of Neovim is its ability to write plugins in any programming language, provided that there is a plugin host available. I have wanted to play around with the Common Lisp host for a while, and I like for something useful to come out of it in the end, so I created Quicklisp.nvim, a plugin which allows users to manage Common Lisp libraries from inside Neovim.Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMTvimlispvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/15/a-new-ssg/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2019/01/15/a-new-ssg/Over two years already without rewriting the workshop? I have to rectify this, with the greatest rewrite yet! I have abandoned Pelican because I constantly had to adjust things manually after the build process, and even then there were parts of the website that weren’t working. This put me off from blogging, since after each post I would have to stitch everything back together by hand. Seeing that no static site generator would be able to meet my needs I decided to instead write my own in Scheme.Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMTorganisationlisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2018/12/01/gnu-linux/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2018/12/01/gnu-linux/I knew this day would come eventually, so here we are: I moved from macOS to GNU/Linux as my operating system. It has been a couple of months since then and I have settled in pretty comfortably; some things are better some things are worse, and some things are just plain different.Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/07/16/functional-fixed-timestep-loop/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/07/16/functional-fixed-timestep-loop/There is a great article by Glenn Fiedler titled “Fix Your Timestep!” in which the author explains various approaches to writing a game loop and concludes with a loop that provides a fixed time step for simulation. If you are not familiar with this topic go read the article first and come back later. The author has written the implementation in C or C++ using a lot of mutation and looping, so I wanted to give a purely functional approach a shot.Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMTlisphttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/05/13/mock-repl-unix/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/05/13/mock-repl-unix/During the development of REPL.nvim I had to be able to test the plugin without relying on any particular REPL present on the development system. The solution was to create a mock REPL, a shell script which acts like a really dumb REPL. Here is the code:Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 GMTmischttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/05/06/introducing-repl-nvim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/05/06/introducing-repl-nvim/Integrating a REPL in Vim has been a difficult issue in the past, but with Nvim’s built-in terminal emulator it is just a few commands away. My new REPL.nvim plugin now puts the REPL only one command away, for any programming language you wish. The end goal is to have a complete generic and configurable REPL framework which can be customised to the needs of any language and which forms a solid foundation for other plugins as well.Sat, 06 May 2017 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/04/25/html-outline-fundamentally-broken/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2017/04/25/html-outline-fundamentally-broken/If you were to run the Workshop through an HTML validator you would notice a lot of warnings about the document outline. What is going on here? HTML 5 defines an outline algorithm which allows browsers and assistive technologies to create an outline of the page. In theory a blind person could ask their reader for the outline of the page and get a sort of table of contents which they could use to quickly jump to a specific part of the page.Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMThtmlranthttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/11/20/introducing-infovim/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/11/20/introducing-infovim/There is a new project up at the Workshop: info.vim, a Vim plugin which implements a complete reader and browser for info documents from within Vim. This is similar to the standalone info program or the Emacs info mode.Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMTvimviminfohttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/09/27/rewriting-the-workshop/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/09/27/rewriting-the-workshop/At this point I could start to make rewriting my website an annual tradition. There have been a number of little details that have been rubbing me the wrong way for almost a year now; the biggest one was the navigation bar on sub-sites like the Grid Framework product site. There were also accessibility issues relating to the lack of a proper HTML document outline and the use of JavaScript.Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtmlhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/07/06/intro-ips-tools/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/07/06/intro-ips-tools/I found myself needing a program to apply binary patches in the IPS file format and I was really disappointed that there are no proper Unix programs for that purpose available. So I set out to make my own, but instead of just applying patches it would be a complete suite of tools to handle all IPS-related tasks.Wed, 06 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcehttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/06/25/highlighting-nsimageview/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/06/25/highlighting-nsimageview/Recently I have been working on a small Cocoa app and one of the things I needed to do was highlight an NSImageView when the user is hovering above it while dragging a file. You would think that it’s a very simple task, and you would be right, but judging by some of the things on the internet it looks like an unsolved problem.Sat, 25 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMTmisccocoahttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/05/31/intro-ntfs-clone/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/05/31/intro-ntfs-clone/This is a very useful project I had written quite a while ago at work and recently found collecting dust on my hard drive. It lets you create perfect 1:1 copies of NTFS hard drives on Unix. The problem with every software I had come across was that it would copy the data, but that wasn’t enough, so we had to run Windows repair on every single drive.Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 GMTopen-sourcehttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/04/22/neovim-tcd/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2016/04/22/neovim-tcd/My Neovim PR to add tab-local working directories has recently been merged. In this post I will explain what it does and why you will love it.Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMTvimvimhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2015/11/14/feeds-live-now/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2015/11/14/feeds-live-now/RSS- and Atom feeds are live now. You can subscribe to an entire blog using the links in the navigator or you can subscribe to a particular category in a blog. For that navigate to the category using either the navigator or by clicking the category button of an article.Sat, 14 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhttps://hiphish.github.io/blog/2015/11/11/we-are-live/https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2015/11/11/we-are-live/The Workshop blog is finally up and running, in all its static glory. This makes the site practically complete, at least as complete as a website can ever be anyway. It also works great with my Multiblog plugin.Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMTorganisationhtml