In Vim (and many other editors) we interact with the contents of files via the “file buffer” abstraction. Basically, that’s the in-memory representation of a file within a text editor, that occasio...

One of the most important aspects of effective editing is to be able to quickly move where you want to go in a buffer - e.g. to a specific line, paragraph, character, word, etc. When it comes to n...

One of the things that had initially frustrated me about Vim is that out-of-the-box there’s no way to toggle comments on and off in programming languages. This definitely struck me as something odd...

When writing long code comments or prose (e.g. in Markdown) I like to have lines and paragraphs neatly formatted to fit the textwidth setting.1 There are two common operators we can use in Vim to a...

These days a lot of programming languages (especially those leaning towards functional programming) offer a pipeline operator (|>), that allows you to feed some data through a “pipeline” of tran...

I maintain a lot of OSS projects and often I struggle to keep up with all the tickets and pull requests they receive. That’s why I’m fond of the stale GHA workflow that automatically marks issues a...

Most people who know me and follow my open-source work are likely going to be surprised that I’m writing an article about Vim. After all, I’ve been a devout member of the Church of Emacs for 20 yea...

Recently I’ve switched from Z Shell (aka Zsh) to Fish, after being a Zsh user since 2008. The experience has been pretty good overall and here I’ll share a few tips for everyone looking to make the...

I recently wrote that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter and I got quite a lot of heat for it. I totally stand by everything I said there, but I acknowledge that different people have different use-...

I’m a big fan of the ~ (tilde) key and I make heavy use of it every day. That’s why I’ve never been fond of keyboards that move its position for whatever reason.1 I’ve discovered Control + ~ almos...