I wrote about espanso in past here and here, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Since helix is (for now) terminal-only editor, my espanso shortcuts work very well with it.

e.g. I can type :smile: and get 😄, and type thru and get through (Automatic correct the usually misspelled words 🎉)

Espanso works well with neovim-in-terminal (and Emacs), but I use Neovide GUI, where they don’t work.

One of the thing that I thought was missing from Helix editor was integration with a decent grammar checker tool. On Emacs and neovim, I use ltex-ls.

To my surprise, it works well (I’m using it already) with Helix.

It is probably not well documented though. I had to look through the github issues, but I did come across the solution.

It is straightforward though.

1. Download the latest release of ltex-ls from here. I preferred the one which comes with jre. Size increases, but it is self-contained. One can choose smaller download if jre is already installed in your setup.
2. Extract it somewhere (e.g., ~/ltex-ls) then create a symbolic link to bin/ltex-ls from somewhere on your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/) like this : sudo ln -s ~/ltex-ls/bin/ltex-ls /usr/local/bin/ltex-ls
3. Add the following to languages.toml file:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-servers = [ "ltex-ls" ]
file-types = ["md"]
scope = "source.markdown"
roots = []

4. Restart Helix.
5. Enjoy 🎉

I came across Helix Editor on youtube when watching about neovim related video.

It is vim like editor. That is, a modal editor.

But it is different in one fundamental way, it terms of how commands work.

In (Neo)vim, it is action followed by object. So delete word becomes dw But in Helix it is other way round. Object followed by Action. So it is word delete hence wd

It takes a bit getting used to.

In my tour of Neovim starter kits, I landed on SpaceVim

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs, and used it for couple of years before settling on Doom Emacs.

Spacemacs inspired SpaceVim.

I had liked the mnenomic keybindings in Spacemacs (and now in SpaceVim)

But Spacevim is different from how other starter kits handle configuration.

Last week, I tried DoomVim (inspired by Doom Emacs) and NVChad (and “Neovim from scratch” by same folks as LunarVim) They all had similar configuration, based on lua

Today I discovered that I can open a nice floating Terminal in the middle of the screen by pressing Ctrl+\

Thanks to toggleterm plugin.

Earlier I used to use :terminal command, which would open a terminal in another tab. I had to switch tabs to use the terminal and going back to editing the files.

With toggleterm I press Ctrl+\, do my terminal tasks, and toggle it again to send it the background. (At least that is what I think happens, since next time I summon it, I can continue where I left off, not a new shell.)

I’ve started watching this YouTube playlist Neovim from scratch

It is a great learning resource.

I use a program called espanso for hotkey expansion across the OS, that has emoji completion option. But it does not work with Vim. Maybe because of modal editing 🤷

While it took me some time to figure out, setting it up is quite straight forward.

1. Install the plugin. Add the following ‘~/.config/nvim/lua/user/plugins.lua’ file use "hrsh7th/cmp-emoji" -- Markdown emoji (Search for -- cmp plugins in the file)

On the Vim Telegram group, I came across this starter kit called Neovim from scratch

But this starter kit is different from others. Others are opinionated (with a good reason). This one seems like purpose built.

Purpose being - to teach the users what goes under the hood. So it comes with a YouTube series.

But ones doesn’t need to follow the YouTube series to use this. One can just clone the git repo and get going.

Today around 10am (or a bit earlier) we lost electricity at our house. Today is Thursday, and power loss isn’t surprising.

As far as I remember, my city always had scheduled power loss on Thursday. This used to happen every week when I was growing up. So much so, that my engineering college had Thursday as a weekly off, due to this. Over the years, things improved, but Thursday remained the day when local electricity company would could schedule the maintenance task.

Today I spent some time getting projectile equivalent working with LunarVim

At first I went with builtin/core plugin projects.nvim. Enabling it was quite straight forward. I wasn’t sure how to add new project.

Then I tried telescope-projects. Even here I could not add new project (Per their documentation, it is Ctrl-a in Insert mode, and just c in normal mode) But I just opened the project root I wanted to work on, and it got added to the list of projects.

For some time now, my KeepassXC browser extension keep informing that I’m using older version of KeepassXC I usually upgrade immediately, so I did. Or so I thought.

I saw the same warning couple of days later. I thought there was new version, but there wasn’t. So installed it again.

This happened one more time, and I realized that even after upgrade, KeepassXC remained at older version (2.66, but as you’ll see it doesn’t matter)