stevengharms.com

Use ack instead of grep to parse text files

steven — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:59:14 +0000

You know this guy?

grep needle haystack |grep special_needle

or his inverted cousin:

grep needle haystack |grep -v unspecial_needle

These are common staples of searching through text files.

You should stop using them. Now.

You can do much better by writing more consice regular expressions and using ack or one of its relatives (ack-grep, or rak).

The primary virtue of these commands is that they use the Perl regular expression engine. Most programmers with experience in any of the major scripting languages will find this more comfortable than grep’s use of the GNU regex syntax.

I recently encountered a need to search through many files based on a complex regular expression that required lookahead and lookbehind asserions. I have no idea how that would work in GNU regex land where, honestly, I still have a hard time getting simple capture and alternation. After learning look around syntax, I was glad to know that ack could directly implement it.

Given haystack, a text file:

tin needle
silver needle
lead needle
ocelot
monkey

Find the needles (this is where most grep users get to and never leave):

$ ack needle haystack
tin needle
silver needle
lead needle

Look at that one character shorter than grep and just as easy. Now if you want the silver needle, the unsophisticated, greppy way of doing this would be:

$ grep needle haystack|grep silver
silver needle

This sucks. Try:

$ ack '(?=silver).*needle' haystack
silver needle

Or, “all things in the haystack that are needles, but not the lead one”

$ ack '^(?!^lead).*needle.*$' haystack
tin needle
silver needle

I know there’s a lot more to the power of the lookaround assertion, but if I can re-train myself out of this habit I think it’ll be a big win. Granted, for smaller searches the “double-grep” method is probably fine, but any time you’re doing a recursive descent and are looking for true needles in the haystack, ack’s is the superior approach.

The case that I was working on was where I needed to search all my Rails models for all named scopes that did not use the lambda form and I wanted five lines of context around the matches so that I could be understand the behavior.

ack -C5 'scope(?!.*lambda)' app/models

That’s gold worth searching for.

The Rasperry Pi

steven — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:36:30 +0000

I heard about this at Golden Gate Ruby Conf this past year from Ron Evans (@deadprogram). It’s a low-power, low cost computer that can be used for lightweight media centers or “learn to program” desktops.

I love the idea of these little machines lurking about hte house doing all sorts of automated stuff for us behind our back. While it’s clearly underpowered to do advanced photo editing, most of our requirements for household computing (yet) are fairly low power with frequent gap time.

Use Vim’s Sessions to Defray Context-Switching Costs

steven — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:08:34 +0000

Introduction

The Vim editor has a built-in function for preserving your editor state — which files you had open, which tabs they were in, etc. — called “Sessions.” In my experience, few Vim users, even experienced / advanced users, take advantage of this feature and that is a shame. Sessions allow you to get you back into the working context of a given problem immediately . If you’ve avoided a needed reboot for software update or wished you could save the context of your editing as related to a specific problem, you should take the time to learn a little bit about sessions.

Curating an Editor State

As developers, we generally start with a single file (“QA says there’s a bug in this view”) and then realize it has a relationship with another file (“Hm, but I need this as the data source / dependency / etc.”). Over time we come to recognize that there are several files whose relationship and interaction creates a “feature” we want to work on. I call this collection of files that represents the means to the solution the “curated list.” We groom our curated list into a user interface that helps us address the problem:

The curated list for this blog post

Finding yourself needing to reboot, where you would wipe away this solution context like some Tibetan sand mandala might put you into a panic routine:

“Which files do I have open? Which directories am I in, which server processes are running?”

The Oatmeal comic hits home:

To save your state all you need to do is run :mksession. By default this will create a file called Session.vim in your working directory. Its contents are a full list of Vimscript commands that will be issued when you launch Vim with a reference to that file with vim -S session_file_name at a later date. Reading this file is also a great way to learn some powerful Vimscript commands.

The commands it requires to re-build your Vim session as it is right now

Standard Vim file-write semantics still apply To overwrite the old session it’s :mksession! and :mksession session-from-after-lunch.vim It is this latter usage which allows you to create ‘topic based sessions.’

Topic-Based Vim Sessions

The average Vim session is very small (kilobytes) and they can be made cheaply (less than a second) therefore, as I work on problems I’ve taken to creating multiple Vim sessions so that I can address a feature and come back to it painlessly.

Presently I’m experimenting on creating sessions based on bug-tracker stories. The session files (ending in .vim) are included in my global .gitignore file. Given that a certain feature may be revisited at any point, it seems a good idea to keep each in its own session so that I can pick it back up again for subsequent bugs / improvements. AND should a refactor add a new file or drop one, all that’s required is a simple mkession! to write a new session.

Gotchas

By default mksession saves blank, buffers, curdir, folds, help, options, tabpages, winsize. Depending on how heavily customized your Vim configuration is, you may find these session commands clashing with your default options. For a heavily customized Vim installation (like Janus Vim) this can create some erratic results. To prevent any clashes, I have modified the default sessionoptions configuration in my .vimrc to be the following:

” Sessions in Janus are overwrought set sessionoptions=blank,buffers,curdir,folds,help,tabpages,winsize

Reference

As sessionoptions seems to suggest, there are a wide variety of things that can be preserved. :help sessionoptions and :help mksession in the on-line Vim help guide should help you tweak your configuration to perfection.

I can even seen an argument for adding a :mksession! as an autocommand, so that your session is written on every file-write or buffer-change event. I don’t (yet) see a need for that, but it’s great to know that Vim has that capability.

Conclusion

With OSX Lion now preserving open application state, browswers now allowing you to save tab state, and Vim now allowing you to preserve buffer state, you can live in less fear of a power outage, an accidental reboot, or a gray screen of death.

Trip to Yosemite

steven — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 22:53:57 +0000

Last weeekend Lauren and a few other friends went up to Yosemite to do some late winter camping. In our three days there we saw rain, big fluffy snowflakes, and spent a bit of time hiding out in our tent-cabin. It was a great, albeit chilly and, at times, wet experience. But for vistas like this, it’s definitely worth going.

Full photo collection

Emil, a friend of Lauren’s friend Brian, had found a program that would allow you to rent a “tent cabin in Curry Village” ahead of the Spring thaw. The tents are basic wooden structures with canvas “walls” and a small heater inside. It’s a good solution for car campers who want the winter experience but who may not have the nerve for winter camping.

It sounded like an amazing — although frosty — proposition and Yosemite is an incredibly beautiful place. So we all headed out on Friday the 16^th to take the path to Yosemite. Arriving a little past four and enduring on and off rain throughout the trip, a dry Yosemite was a welcome sight. While the weather was holding out on us as we arrived, the pictures show that something serious was coming. The feeling I had in these was unsettled.

Toward dark we headed into Curry Village and got set up in our cabin. Within an hour or so we had opened up some snacks, had some delicious bourbon and headed to the local mess hall for some dinner. Upon our return it started pouring and we played some Uno to while away the evening. I remember when I noticed that suddenly, I wasn’t hearing the rain anymore. We opened up the front door and saw about an inch of snow had fallen. After we turned in we found that another half-foot of snow fell while we slept and that we were in for a cold and rainy / snowy day.

Pic of our tent-cabin and surroundings

This prediction was accurate. I wound up wearing my snowboarding gear with a rainshell throughout the day. That night after some much-needed downtime in the cabin to warm back up we headed to the Yosemite lodge for some St. Patrick’s drinks.

Our last day, Sunday, was spectacular as the sun came out, the temperatures remained cold and we were able to take some stunning photos before descending from the mountain. The trip back was slow going thanks to a few snowstorms and a few icy patches, but Brian braved them all and got us back home safe and sound in the Audi.

Thoughts about “Dune”

steven — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:25:44 +0000

Ryan wrote a thoughful post about catching a 35mm print of Lynch’s “Dune”) at the Alamo Drafthouse. He notes that despite arriving “DOA” in 1984, it was, today, “a bit of a cult movie.” I thought I would take a few moments to write down why I am a member of the “Dune” cult following. In short, the reason I love “Dune” is because it is an artistically rich disaster.

The Critical Response

For a standard opinion on the movie, I refer to Roger Ebert’s review of January 1, 1984:

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; …David Lean solved that problem in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not shabby and drab.

The Financial Response

“Dune” cost its production company, de Laurentiis Productions, approximately $40M to make. It grossed ~$30M. A $10M loss before DVD, resale, and licensing agreements was a staggering loss.

So I can make neither the argument that “Dune” was misunderstood by audiences: they voted no with their dollars. Nor can I say this was an artist’s movie, a beautiful avant garde that only the critics grasped. Yet nevertheless I admire and respect this movie. Why?

Why I love “Dune” anyway

Filming the Dune Universe is a Grand Dream

The Dune universe is so expansive and thoroughly-concieved that it is like the vast desert of Arrakis itself. When your imagination finally collapses, dehydrated, cooked and lost in the middle of a sand sea, you realize just how engulfing Frank Herbert’s vision was, and that you’re nowhere close to any respite from its expansivenes.

It asks, in its (roughly) 6 books, What would civilization look like after the machines take over (Matrix-style) and after humans re-take control of their destiny sans “thinking machines?” It imagines how humans could alter, drug, and meditate themselves into filling the void left by the proscription of computing and asks what would happen if there were a constrained commodity that was the fulcrum for this replacement? It even goes on to ask “Can any one being assure humanity’s success against its inherent favor for the easy path and its naïve assumption that the universe is a benevolent place.”

Furthermore a great deal of the plot action is entirely mental. Thanks to his genetics and mass overdose of spice, Paul’s (portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan) consciousness is literally being rewired. This is not a change that suits a visible medium.

These constraints should scream out to anyone: “this is unfilmable.” Nevertheless, Lynch and de Laurentiis tried, joining a club of the truly audacious film-makers. I would put them in the ranks of “Gone With the Wind,” or “Citizen Kane,” “Apocalypse Now, or “Fitzcarraldo.” While those productions ended in vaunted success, “Dune” did not. They aimed for the moon, and falling short, left us a beautiful, broken body of Icarus in which we can find the beauty of grand, failed, ideas.

But it is not only the act of making this film which was a grand dream, there are beautiful dreams inside of the film’s content which speak to a grand and majestic artistic vision.

The Beautiful Wreckage that Speaks of a Grand Dream

The Costumes and Sets

They are beautiful artifacts that will stand witness to generations to come of a time when movies hired artisans to bring forth in façades, veneers, and lighting the imagined dreams of science fiction. While these dreams can be hacked together in days by talented computer scientists or teens with time and rendering software, there was a time when sets were conceived in lumber, lights, and fabrics.^* The loss of this skill and this style of movie making is economically expeditious, logical, and very, very sad.

The Acting and Actors

Here in the Bay Area many people choose to work at start-ups. Many of them fail. Here we have a shrug attitude toward failure. You meet people, you work as hard as you can, and then, sometimes, you fail. Sometimes those friends you make in the failing are the crucial people you wind up needing in the successful launch. For example, the much-vaunted Twitter hatched from the now-forgotten odio.com.

“Dune” is similar because it is a weird and fascinating waypoint for so many actors’ and type of actors’ careers that it maintains a fascinating magnetism.

David Lynch’s Favorites
1. Kyle MacLachlan established his Lynch bona fides here and went on to wonderful and weird pairings: “Twin Peaks,” “Blue Velvet, et al.”
2. Freddie Jones: Last seen in The Elephant Man
The BBC drama / Royal Shakespeare Company
1. The “I, CLAVDIVS” crowd. Finishing in 1976, this miniseries starred
  1. Sian Philips: The mother from Hell, Livia to become the Reverend Mother from Hell, Mohaim in “Dune”
  2. Patrick Stewart: Sower of insurrection, Sejanus to become arms-master Gurney Halleck, to become CAPTAIN MOTHER!@#%% PICARD
2. Francesca Annis: Recently of the BBC’s Lillie and in an odd genre cross-over, “Krull.”
Culty Actors:
1. Virginia Madsen: Beautiful beyond words, you could believe she might have been the emperor of the Known Universe’s daughter, but with that Lynch-y iciness repeated again with (oh geez, where to start) Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet” or Patricia Arquette in “Lost Highway.”
2. Brad Dourif: Just courted a Oscar in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” plays human computer Piter de Vries
3. Jürgen Prochnow: The captain from 1981’s “Das Boot” (what a movie!)
4. Max von Sydow: Enough said.
5. Richard Jordan: Co-star in the iconic “Logan’s Run”

But, as Ebert rightly said in his review, many of the actors are terribly underutilized. They stare, they stand, they do not emote. They wear weird BDSM-y tight-fitted leather suits.^**

The Director: David Lynch

In 1984 David Lynch was coming off of the success of the indie freakshow “Eraserhead” and the mainstream drama “The Elephant Man.” How de Laurentiis decided that Lynch, one of the most cutting-edge of directors this side of Un Chien Andalou, was the right call for space opera I’d love to know. If you like films that are both banal and horrible, American and international, rich and gruesome, erotic and complex, then the Lynchian element only adds to this film’s grounds for fascination.

Soundtrack by TOTO

‘Nuff said. This worked so well for Queen / Flash Gordon, apparently, they wanted another electronic-y rock act to rock-opera-tize the background sounds. Sweet.

Was the Audience Too Unready?

Yet for all the grandness of vision, the film didn’t connect with audiences. As Ryan noted, a movie that tries to sum up the setting in its poster is in trouble. An even worse portent was that a glossary of terms was handed to attendees^*** to help them make sense of this world (on the assumption that they hadn’t read the book(s)). Can I blame anyone for thinking that this movie isn’t worth a second look? Can I blame those Pac-Man Fever beseiged folks of 1984 for not attending enough “Dune” showings? No, I admit, I cannot.

Maybe by all objective measure “Dune” was a failure. Yet somehow in all that failure, “Dune” still feels more like a success, of a sort, to me, due to its fascinating fallout. And perhaps this is what’s important about why I like “Dune:” liking it says something about me that I like to imagine about myself. And this is certainly the mechanism of how “cult” films work: to like “Dune” or “Rocky Horror Picture Show” says something about us, the “Dune”-o-philes.

The Dune Shibboleth

While most fans will concede the criticisms against the movie, it is in spite of them, or perhaps because of them that, we, fans, love it even more. I think it’s because to say “I love this failure, warts and all” says something about you.

It says that you believe in the triumph of Romanticism, and love, and intelligence against the forces of military control and exploitation. You love that an artist’s artist somehow conned a reputable (shush you, there in the Peanut gallery) production company out of tons of money to attempt to film the unfilmable. You’re proud that Lynch and de Laurentiis, struck out to take that huge block of marble and fashion something great out of it. You’re proud to say that scary boundaries should be pushed and that when the attempt fails there can still be a wonderful fallout. In fact, what the great literary philosopher Craig Ferguson once said of “Dr. Who” holds true for “Dune.”

One thing is consistent, though and this is why the show is so beloved by geeks and nerds. It’s all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism…and if there is any hope for us in this giant explosion that we inhabit…it’s [that] intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism (source

Conclusion

There’s something different about this failure that makes it greater than other cinematic failures (say Uwe Böll’s “Blubberella”). It wasn’t a failure in art, or a failure to dream, it was only that the dream was too big for its container, the project too vast to manage, the source material too rich to be handled by mere mortals and technology of 1983. As ever, I think of amicus loquax Ovid:

solis
mollit odoratas, pennarum vincula, ceras; tabuerant cerae: nudos quatit ille lacertos, remigioque carens non ullas percipit auras

the sun
softens the fragrant wax, the bindings of the feathers the waxen joints melt: the boy shakes bare forearms, but, stripped, he holds the air no more with his strokes

I hope there are always those who dare to dream magnificent dreams. They shall always find me in their corner, cheering them on against the odds and eagerly awaiting the beautiful lessons they find on the edge of failure and regardless of whether they fall into that chasm themselves.

Footnotes:

^*: I even feel this now as I watch the original-original-original versions of the “Star Wars” trilogy. The seduction of George Lucas to the dark side of CGI-driven special effects might be a fitting meta-trilogy for an enterprising documentary director.

^**: How much do I love to parse Dino de Laurentiis’ motivations. This is a man whose movies never, ever apologized for projecting the virgin / whore dyad (Dale / Aura in Flash Gordon, Irulan / Chani in Dune, Valeria / Witch in Conan the Barbarian, The Queen / Sonja in Red Sonja) into their arc with appropriately provocative / diaphanous fabric choices to match. I know it’s not PC, but I also like his naïvité as a post-war cinema content generator. I can imagine what he would have said: “Look, ya gotta have a pretty good girl, and a pretty bad girl. Why are you hasslin’ me about this?”

^***: This also happened at “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” this year. We were given brochures that broke down the “spy lingo.” Knowing this story on “Dune” I was worried for TTSS. Thankfully it turned out to be comprehensible (even without the insert).

Fascinating: Why we should let go of π in favor of τ

steven — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:02:52 +0000

As a person who took Trigonometry as an adult (at 29!), I was amazed by how much more fascinating the relationship between π and radii became. I even spent some time building squares of golden sections with a compass, just like the ancients used to. In this post below, Vi Hart makes a compelling argument that we should move on from π and move to τ. It’s a fascinating concept, but what I like most about it is that it still preserves some of the aesthetic mysteries that fundamental trigonometry provides.

Using mutt with MacVim as external editor

steven — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:05:51 +0000

I love usig the mutt mail reader to turn through my mail. I recently set it up to make use of my MacVim installation by adding the following configuration to the .muttrc.

set editor="mvim --remote-tab-wait-silent "

This is pretty neat. When I go to reply or compose, I’m thrown into a new tab in MacVim and I can compose / reply there. After hitting ZZ or :wq!, mutt properly handled the signal, but didn’t change OSX’s focus back to the terminal window where Mutt was running. By changing the editor to the following configuration:

set editor="osascript $HOME/bin/mutt_edit.sh"

I was able to tell Mutt to send my temp file (for the edit) to osascript, a utility that runs Applscript. In mutt_edit.sh I provided a bit of a wrapper around the mvim command such that it told OSX to re-activate my terminal session after the editing activity finished. Here’s the code:

on run argv
  tell application "Finder"
    do shell script "mvim --remote-tab-wait-silent " & item 1 of argv
  end tell
  tell application "iTerm (1.0.0.20111020)"
    activate
  end tell
end run

And that’s all it took.

Technical Outreach Workshops: Needlessly Frightening at the Beginning

steven — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:52:41 +0000

One of the organizations that I’m most proud of helping out is Railsbridge. It aims to increase the diversity within open source software development, particularly women. Twice now I have worked with wonderful and amazing people in these sessions.

Typical scene of getting laptops set up (source)

In these activities I have encountered a powerful enemy to successful teaching that we, as organizers and teachers, should remain vigilant against: negative confirmation bias.

Negative confirmation bias is when a student walks into a situation expecting that s/he is not going to succeed and then proceeds to look for data to back up that negative view. Why students have this negative view is a subject for another post, but it is my belief that it is at the heart of why there is such poor diversity in high tech.^* At development workshops / boot camps, students encounter a dangerous confirmant of their negative bias in one the earliest steps: “Bootstrap the setup using git.”

Facilitators must take an active role in reminding students that the installation / bootstrap step bears no inherent reflection upon their ability to enjoy, learn from, and perform well in the class.

It’s surprising since planners and facilitators work so hard to make so many other aspects of the student’s engagement easy so as to counter the possibility of negative confirmation. Specifically, Railsbridge sessions do a great job:

Delivering an energetic environment that checks: “I knew developers were boring, I don’t belong there.”
Saying “welcome” upon check-in that mitigates: “Everyone ignored me, I knew I didn’t belong there.”
Pre-communicating the transport situation that checks: Couldn’t park, probably didn’t belong there anyway.”
Building “pods” where informal collaboration occurs that checks: “*No one saw I was confused, I knew everyone there was smarter than me. I knew I didn’t belong there. *”
Providing power strips, snacks, job prospects, etc.

But then we run the risk of glossing over something that seems very simple. We command:

“git clone a respository so that we can all start on the same page.”

This is a simple operation for anyone who has it as part of their daily workflow — something that we do with the casualness of deleting a file. But it is easy forget that this culminating activity is built upon a series of installations and configurations. To wit:

“Git clone a respository so that we can all start on the same page.”
- git clone http://github.com/some/repo railsbr
- get git
  - get [homebrew](http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/)
  - get gcc and its libraries
  - get gcc from the Kenneth Reitz bundle OR
  - get gcc from XCode for Lion OR
  - get gcc from a legacy XCode
- Tacitly understand the concept of a SCM
- etc.

The challenges, tweaks, and reliance on facilitators’ judgment that “Oh don’t worry about this, it’s not fatal” or “Oh, right, we need to copy XCode from the USB key” can easily upset the student’s steady growth in confidence at the most critical, incipient point. Facilitators would be wise to handle this particular snag carefully.

The last session I participated in focused on essential web development skills: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery. git has absolutely no direct relationship to style of development.^** Yet as we stepped through this stack of activities, I could almost hear the biases finding confirmation: “If I can’t get this working and the thing hasn’t even started yet, there’s no way I’ll figure out the rest.”

BUT once the students got past the installation snarl, they were well on their way and, from the feedback, it seems all the students (and teachers!) learned a lot and had a great time. It is absolutely essential that facilitators recognize this weakness in our curriculum and set expectations around it properly.

Big Nerd Ranch founder Aaron Hillegass has a great section in the beginning of his Cocoa programming for Mac OSX. I learned a lot from Aaron several years ago and I think of this story whenever I get disappointed or let down in my battles learning anything. Heck I’ve even repeated a paraphrase of it to some of my students at events like this. Here is is from the source:

“I used to have a boss named Rock. Rock had earned a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech and had never had a job in which he used his knowledge of the heavens. Once I asked him whether he ever regretted getting the degree. “Actually, my degree in astrophysics has proved to be very valuable,” he said. “Some things in this world are just hard. When I am struggling with something, I sometimes think ‘Damn, this is hard for me. I wonder if I am stupid,’ and then I remember that I have a degree in astrophysics from Cal Tech; I must not be stupid.”

Recommendations for Organizers

If organizers use git or other bits of hacker-friendly technology to get your students bootstrapped, it is imperative that you explain that success with git has no inherent bearing on success with web development in general, ruby, or rails in particular.

It’s also worth bearing note that this applies to many of the other macroscopic activities that happen at workshops. rails g migration renameUserToClient runs on a similar “stack” of assumptions required to get the framework. The student will likely lack the familiarity required to discern the difference and conclude that:

difficulty bootstrapping a tool == difficulty using the tool == I am stupid

Here are some approaches that I’ve tried. Obviously, no approach is perfect for all students, but here are some ideas.

“This is magic, this is weird stuff and it’s something you’ll learn, but for today, let’s just follow the instructions and not worry about the particulars. It’s not programming, it’s just a tool.”
“The goal for us, as teachers, is to get everyone on the same page. This is just administration, not really coding $TECHNOLOGY_NAME so much. But we need you to help us get your machine ready and we’ve chosen one of the most difficult ways possible to do it (ha-ha).”
Use the “stack” metaphor above to explain that all of these little steps add up to completing the one simple task of getting the student on the “same page” by cloning a repository
Explain only as much as the student asks for. For example: “What’s git?” It’s a way for synchornizing files from a master source. We want all of the students to have a synchronized “base” state. NOT: It’s a DCVS that uses linked lists, has lightweight branching, and no designated HEAD.

The hard part is to become interested, to wake up early, to find parking / take transit, and to have the courage to actually open the door and say “I don’t know, but I want to know.” A bunch of noise about libraries should not halt that process or that progress.

Footnotes:

* Approximately 28% of high tech work is female; 2% in open source.

** In Railsbridge’s other sessions on Rails the linking is more obvious as one must use git to deploy the code to public servers. But acumen with an SCM certainly has no necessary correlation to success in the field of software development.

Blogging in Janus + MacVim + Vimblog

steven — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:49:13 +0000

As I mentioned elsewhere, my friend Daniel Miessler said that he would be ready to give up Textmate for Vim but were it for the level of blogging support. I have, hopefully, made it easier to do so. In fact, I’m writing this blog post and using my fork of Vimblog to manage it.

Here’s how this post was made:

:Blog np created a new post
Moved down to the Categs line and then: :Blog cl
/Techno to match the right line. Hit enter.
Vimblog just copied the category name to the yank clipboard for me and then…
p to paste it in
G to the end of the file
o to start typing
Typed Daniel Miessler
v2b\gifl did a Google I’m feeling Lucky to his site and wrapped it in a markdown link
More editing
:Blog draft (because it’s still alpha-grade code) so I could check it out in WordPress
Took a screen-shot of vim to put in the post
:Blog um ~/Desk/vimb
Vimblog pasted the url link to the image that makes this work:
Published this post with :Blog publish
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Blogging with Vim

steven — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:09:21 +0000

I have been wanting to get the Vim Editor working as a tool for blogging. I’d discussed this a time or two with my friend Daniel Miessler, and he brought up a critical thing that was missing for him in migrating away from Textmate: the ability to do an “I’m feeling lucky” hotlink onto a word as one is composing.

I had to admit, this was a pretty compelling feature provided by Textmate’s “Hyperlink Helper” bundle. Its lack definitely hindered my drive to blog in vim.

To that end, I have created my first Vim plugin and port this sexy capability to Vim.

The port is called GIFL which is not some sort of obscure term for attractive septugenarians, but rather is Google I’m Feeling Lucky.

With this installed you can do things like:

Imagine you have the following text, with your cursor at ‘*’:

*lindsay lohan

Now enter:

\gifl2e

You now have:

[lindsay lohan](http://www.myspace.com/lindsaylohan*)

That is, the Markdown code for a URL. That’s pretty handy. This loads up in the global namespace, so you can use it anywhere and everywhere. I’ve found it suprpisingly handy in places other than a blogging context. It’s still very, very, very alpha, but it gets the job done.

I must say that coding in vimscript is a bit of a challenge, but I have been greatly helped by Steve Losh’s Learn Vimscript the Hard Way.

By the way, thanks to Pedro MG’s vimblog project, I was able to write this post in Vim, with GIFL doing nearly all the linking.

I think that both GIFL and Vimblog need to be polished a bit before I can say that, together, they make it as easy as it was in Textmate to be a blogger, but it’s definitely closer. Thanks to Macvim + Janus as platform, this is close.