motidu day 03: using vim and haskell

tldr:

setting vim up to be more comf with longlines

haskell stuff

email stuff

qutebrowser, midori, nyxt, other garbage

newsboat and other feedreaders

it's day 3 in "a month of things i don't use" and i'm getting the shakes from being away from emacs for so long! writing this because of the usual: i don't want to practice bass right now and i need to procrastinate.

vim stuff

so i've been learning vim. i started learning haskell because it looks cute and i don't use it yet, but learning haskell has really made me realize how much i need to learn about vim!

insert / command modes

i know how these work, but i find that i'm reaching up to slap the escape key too often. holding alt acts the same way as pressing escape, so when i do 'M-h', my cursor will move to the left and vim will enter command mode! then i can press 'i' again to edit.

so far it's okay. i also use ':imap hc' so that when i type the characters 'hc' in insert mode (h and c are very close on dvorak), vim enters command mode! i just hope i don't run into any words that use those two characters together!

long lines

i like gemini's use of longlines, and vim can sort of work with them, so i'm happy about that! i use the following in my vimrc:

gj and gk work the exact same way as j and k, as far as i know, but the difference is that, when you're editing a longline, gk moves up a single /visual/ line, rather than one /logical/ line! that is to say, if i have a long line that softwraps over 7 lines, regular k skips all 7, cause those 7 lines aren't /real/ lines! gk, though, only acts on "visual lines", that is, even if the line is technically a single line, gk treats it like 7 individual lines. very handy!

vim has options like 'set wrapmargin' and 'set breakat', but setting them didn't seem to change the right margin at all. that's okay, though.

numbers and fun stuff

i'm going to say i really enjoyed vim's easy numbering. i just type any number

into command mode, and then the next command will be run that many times!

haskell stuff

i only did an hour of learning haskell yesterday evening, but i found the syntax super cute! i've been meaning to learn this language cause i love functional langs and people tend to rave about haskell a lot, so that's nice.

generally, i do like how there are no parens *or* commas in the function definitions, like:

it feels lispy enough that i'm not totally lost, but new enough that i'm not bored with it! some people have vented to me about their frustrations about haskell, but most of it went over my head, so i'll keep trying to make a few small things with it, cause it's fun!

also the fact that specifying types is optional but possible is very handy! saying "this function *must* take an int and a float as arguments!" is really handy!

email stuff

i got my email working with 'mailutils' and 'msmtp'. i wrote a full tutorial about it not too long ago, so i won't go into details here. i'm just including it because i want my 'motidu' updates to act as summaries of what i got done so far!

read the email post here

web browsers

as much as lynx works, a lot of the time it doesn't. i tried midori but it's just not fun at all for some reason. opening a new tab is slow as heck, and there's no option to disable to speed dial! ouch. no thanks. nyxt was pretty cute but it crashed often. some people suggested qutebrowser and that was pretty fun, actually!

so now, when i absolutely need a gui web browser, i use qutebrowser. not that i really use it that often, anyway, but it's handy to have!

sad that web browsers have to be so big. happy because gemini exists! :3

feed readers

using newsboat. kind of sad cause i already use and know newsboat, but i couldn't find any other feedreader that's in the alpine package manager! there are a few that sounded cool, like snownews, termfeed, and canto. maybe sometime i'll compile one, but i don't really read feeds anyway.

conclusion

yeah so far the month has been... different, but fun! i've been spending too much time in config files and searching for new programs, and too little time playing bass, but that's okay!

speaking of programming languages, i also want to try out:

zig

d

ocaml

julia

i also am kind of, sort of, not all that interested in languages like ruby, python, and js, because those make the money, but eh i'll probably just do a few tutorials and leave it at that.

anyway yeah that's it. it's been fun!

march 11, 2021