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 😄

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.

Yet having built-in spell checker is always nice.

Helix is a great editor. I’m trying it more and more these days (Like this post is edited in helix)

While shift from action->object to object->action in itself is big change (muscle memory), there are indeed other differences as well.

Luckily, it is easy to add keybindings to helix. Turns out someone took this too far, and created a lot of keybindings to make helix more like Vim

Refer to this for the entire config.

I had written about Telekasten earlier, but in the context that I was unable to get it working with NVChad.

But I must confess, I almost forgot about it.

I should use it daily (as intended) to capture things I’m doing, where am I blocked, what unblocked me, make it as part of my daily workflow.

I have seen my colleague keeping a simple daily.txt file open in Sublime, and it works for them (I hope)

When working on large(ish) code files, sometimes it is easier to fold rest of the code from that file and focus on one “block” at a time.

I use the word “block” because based on the context, it means different things. It could be as big as a class (if the file contains multiple classes) or as small as a if-else block.

But this functionality is not always turned on.

NvChad is yet another neovim starter kit.

Creator of NvChad is on the VimUser’s Telegram Group. So I was intrigued to try NvChad. (I had tried it a while ago, but decided to visit it later. That “later” is now)

One of the plugin I use is Telekasten. It reminds me of Dendron, another tool I used to use (requires VSCode, which I consider too heavy. But Dendron now works without VScode as well. Also, “daily notes” is just one of the features of Dendron. That is the feature I use with Telekasten)

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.