Weeknotes 219

The Nemotode army and sticky traps are having some effect.

Things were said:

After my initial excitement over Alien: Earth I think I reluctantly need to admit to myself that it isn’t holding together as I had hoped.

I was wrong. Very wrong. Episode 5 is excellent.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to all involved.

Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails

When I exit a tmux session (usually by CTRL-d) tmux detaches from all sessions. I always have several sessions running at one time so I then need to to run tmux a to reattach – it’s pretty annoying and has been bugging me for years.

Well, no more. This week, I made this life changing commit.

set-option -g detach-on-destroy off

From the man page:

If off, the client is switched to the most recently active of the remaining sessions.

I don’t know when this option was introduced (I have a feeling after I last looked into the issue) but I’m glad I have it now.

Tom Select – handy, dandy, fancy select library.

DevKnife – neat idea.

DevKnife replaces browser tabs, CLI scripts, and scattered tools with one native Mac app.

There are other ways to achieve the sort of things this app provides but it’s nice that it’s all packaged up in one easy tool.

More workflow improvements - I can now fuzzily change tmux sessions using fzf. Hitting CTRL-b-s now invokes fzf with a list of running sessions which I can filter and change to by pressing ENTER. Nice.

I started reading two books this week: 1) A History of Britain in 10 Enemies by Terry Deary; and 2) The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Both seem to get polarizing reviews, which is an interesting coincidence.

The Artist’s Way is based on a programme/workshop to get your creativity going. An early part of the book introduces what Julia Cameron calls “Morning Pages”. The idea is that forcing yourself to complete 3 pages of text every morning gets the creative juices flowing in some way.

It might be bs, but I’ve been trying it for a week so far. Mine has turned into a traditional journal already, which I’m not sure is the point, but still, the act of writing by hand (however tortuous, and I can assure you Day 1 was like torture) feels like it connects something in the brain.

One of my teeth broke late Sunday night. I knew this time was coming as I’ve been fairly issue free for the last few years. Of course I haven’t sorted a new dentist since moving so I now have a two week wait for an appointment which will be ok as long as it remains pain free.

I wanted to try out Neovim nightly so I decided to put the control of which Neovim is installed under asdf. I’m not sure if it meets my needs or not yet.

Over to Sheffield on Thursday to see JJ – very much enjoyed chatting and catching up 😊

Rails Blocks – “UI components for your Rails app”

A ready-to-use collection of 230+ UI components with minimal dependencies and a focus on simplicity

How I Write Code That I Don’t Hate Reading a Week Later

The mark of a good developer isn’t just building systems that work — it’s writing code that remains kind, even after time passes.

Some good tips in here.

Neovim is a Multiplexer

In this post, I plan to talk about :terminal.

I have more or less ignored :terminal as a feature since it was added to Neovim, so this was interesting.

As part of my “sort your shit out” enterprise I have started meditating again. 5 out of 7 days so far as I type this (there is still time to make it 6 today!).

The difference between starting meditation now and at other times in the past is that I don’t feel I need it right now. There is no current crisis. But I feel that sitting and reflecting in whatever way is a good practice.

Speaking of which, I needed to load my guided meditation audio back onto my iPhone (I don’t remember removing the files, but they were nowhere to be found).

I’ve moaned about this before, but the process is absolutely baffling when you don’t do it very often. Do I need to use the macOS Music app or Finder or both? I have to search how to do this every time. Terrible experience from Apple.

I guess they are not incentivised to make this better when they want you to be streaming instead.

New keyboard time! Somewhat on a whim I decided to buy yet another new keyboard. This time the ZSA Voyager. A split keyboard again, but this one is smaller than the ErgoDox EZ I already own and don’t use. I hoping this is one of the differentiators to actually using it.

The other differentiator being a plan towards learning. This keyboard is not going to get used simply by hope. The ZSA team seem very aware that there is a barrier to entry with their products (I’d imagine a lot of people give up) and as a result they seem to have put a lot of effort into their support systems.

The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations – very good 👏