For many years I have been an emacs editor user and have scoffed (loudly, with spittle) in the general direction of vi users. Well this weekend whilst on call I took the opportunity to learn the vim editor. ‘vi’ was my first unix editor (as it is for most people) and I’m now in a position to appreciate vim’s elegance and approach. It’s not emacs, but it’s not a hunk of junk.

In the unix / linux world ( and thus, by extension the Mac OS X universe as well ) there is much to-do made about the choice of text editors. Why Does It Matter Much of the configuration of these various systems is centered around the generation / manipulation of text-based configuration files. For example, if you’re on windows and you want to change your timezone you must go to Start Button / Control Panel / Time and Date / Timezone. On Unix / Linux / Mac OSX you simply edit a text file, change the word from PST to CDT ( or what have you ) save the file and you’re done.

A great feature that ships with VSCode is the “tasks” capability. I’ve not seen many developers use it, so I thought I’d document how it’s made my life blogging with a statically-generated site simpler.

Often, when doing any development, developers find themselves performing certain loops: drop to shell, run some command, capture output, paste output back into the editor, etc. Eventually most developers wind up curating a per-project set of shell aliases and functions to accelerate that loop. Perhaps the high-water mark for this behavior is the Rails framework which came with a task runner, rake, by default.

I’m glad to say that VSCode has a built-in task runner facility that can be leveraged to make whole series of routine tasks much more pleasant.