Obsidian.nvim plugin

After using vim keybindings inside Obsidian, I came across obsidian.nvim plugin that makes working with Obsidian from inside Neovim pleasurable. This is definitely better than vim keybindings in Obsidian 1 But I had not not used neovim in a long time. After I upgraded to Monterey, I had not installed neovim again. So getting it (as in neovim) was a bit of work. But I had my old config saved, so at least I didn’t have to start from the ground floor.

Obsidian has vim keybindings

Today I discovered that Obsidian supports vim style keybindings out of the box. But it knows that vim is not for everyone. So it checks whether you know what you are doing (when you enable the setting, which is OFF by default) by having you enter a command in a pop up 😄 TBH, one can easily find out that command and “cheat”. On the other hand, if you don’t know vim, and still want to turn on the setting (by cheating) - you deserve what you get 😄

Obsidian

Obsidian is not new to me. I come across it from time to time, but never paid much attention. That changed when I migrated my PKM site to use Obsidian-zola. Technically, it use Zola, and has nothing to do with Obsidian (for Publishing) The “source” is maintained in Obsidian, but it is just collection of markdown files, which can easily be maintained outside. But then I got Obsidian desktop installed. I used it for making minor edits to markdown files.

→ Bruno: Local-first Postman Alternative ∞

I think I came across this tool via Hacker News 🤔. But may be not. Anyway, it does not matter.

Why it appealed to me ?

At work, we have a shared Postman workspace, which often breaks.

Because anyone and everyone can modify it (which is some times needed) But then people click the Save button, because it is easy to 😄

and now, it is broken for others.

OK, there is a concept of fork in Postman, but then everyone has their own fork.

It is same as git fork. One has to keep the fork up to date.

Here comes bruno.

First thing I liked about it is that we can import from Postman. So that one does not need to create entire collection from scratch.

Once imported, it becomes a script/text, which can be version controlled

Next thing is secrets.

I have not yet figured out where and how they are stored. But secrets is one of the reasons, I was attracted to bruno

With local first, developers are free to use their own passwords on their machines.

I was able to get APIs working from Postman to bruno without much friction.

I did have to create environments from scratch. Not sure why they were not exported by Postman Maybe because they contain secrets ? 🤔

But once I added all the variables to Local environment, I can just copy-and-modify to create other environments.

At work we have a LOT of environments (At least 10. Yeah, I know)

I’ll be exploring bruno’s capacities in coming days. Like Bruno CLI, tests etc.

Spellcheck in Vi/m

I’ve been using vi for 20+ years and somehow I didn’t know that it has spell check built in 🤷‍♂ Enable it by simply :set spell Now misspelled words are shown in red background 1 (depending on the terminal’s capability this might vary - I assume) Off course, this is nowhere near full fledged LSP like ltex which I use with emacs and helix. ltext does more than spell check.

Switched to Arc

I wrote about Arc browser earlier here. At that time, I was still on macOS catalina, version of macOS not supported by many, including brew and Arch browser. Now that I have successfully upgraded - I was able to get Arc working on my personal machine as well. I did not wish to make this default on my work machine - wasn’t sure if it was supported (based on Chromium, so it should work, still if something does not work, getting support from IT won’t be easy.

→ Zed Editor ∞

My colleague told me about this new editor written in rust yesterday. The feaure page mentioned vim-mode, so I was OK to try it.

It seems collaboration is their USP - I don’t see using that feature personally anytime soon.

So what about rest of the features ?

My first impression is that it can be light alternative to VSCode. It has similar UI structure, default keymap as VScode. It supports few languages Out of the box, Ruby being one of them, so I may try it at work as well.

Coming back to vim-mode - the reason for which I even was ready to try it. It was not easy to enable it. I had expected to find it under keymap.

But vim-mode is restricted to modal editing, so one needs to enable it via settings.json (similar to VScode) and set "vim-mode": true there. Other things - not related to modal editing, but I have come to rely upon - like : commands to save (:w), or :1 to jump to the beginning of the file, do not work.¹

Opening new file wasn’t intuitive. It closed the existing file. There is no New tab either.

But after adding the folder to the project and opening anotehr file from the same project, opened it in separate tab. 😌

In conclusion :

1. Good attempt to provide VScode alternative. Because it is a native app, it will be faster than Electron app
2. This is not meant to be terminal app anyway. So for modal editing in terminal, I will stick to helix

VSpaceCode

I have written earlier that I’ve started using VSCode occasionally for work. Finding files and find-in-files is much better and faster. But I do miss modal editing. That is where VSpaceCode comes in. VSpaceCode is Spacemacs like keybindings for Visual Studio Code I had come across VSpaceCode almost two years ago I was using VSCodium at that time (hoping it is faster than VSCode - it isn’t - on my old machine) and could not install VSpaceCode.

NANO Minemacs

In my earlier post I had mentioned that I might try combining NANO emacs features with Minemacs - which is my current Emacs setup. NANO emacs README has instructions for manual install which is what I ended up doing. There is a separate repo just for the NANO theme, but somehow it did not work for me. Instead, cloning the NANO emacs repo, and adding “just enough"™️ configuration to Minemacs worked for me.

→ The Arc Browser ∞

Finally, got the access to the Arc browser.

Quick overview of what it is.

It is build on top of Chromium browser engine. But adds difference experience altogether. Benefit of using Chromium is that most of the extensions that work with Google Chrome already work. In fact, one installs the extensions from Google Chrome webstore itself 😄

Most awesome feature that made me want to try it is that it will Auto-close inactive tabs after 12 hours (default - can be increased to 24 hours, 7 or 30 days)

They have and publicize the keyboard shortcuts. All browsers have keyboard shortcuts, but other the usual ones to open and close new window/tab, I hardly use any.

I also tried Notes that can be shared with anyone. I’m unlikely to use the share functionality. But the Easel - which allows drawing (and sharing) - seems interesting.

The concept of Little Arc is interesting. It is a smaller (hence Little) floating browser window.

They also have split view which I’m yet to explore. Seems useful when using bigger monitor.

If you want to try it yourself, here is an invite link