roguelazer's website

It's been a little while since I posted about my editor configuration¹, and I thought I might post what I'm using now. I guess the most notable change is that (after much prodding from my coworker Drew Ditthardt) I've switched from Vim to Neovim. Neovim is a vim-compatible editor written in C and Lua (as opposed to Vim, which is written in C, Vimscript, and prayers). I upgraded to Vim 8 last year and have had a few too many segmentation faults in the editor, so I decided to switch to something where more functionality was implemented in a memory-safe language. So far, Neovim has been pretty good to me, although the new process model means that it's pretty hard to write functions which invoke an external process which takes interactive input from a user.

As is probably expected for this sort of thing, here's a couple of screenshots; the first is of VimR, and the second is from NeoVim in Terminal.app, both editing files from rust-mysql-binlog:

Some minor site updates over the last few days:

• Comments are now powered by Commento instead of Disqus. This significantly reduces page load size on pages with comments.
• Icons (social media, etc) are all now 2x resolution for modern retina screens.
• Site-specific search is now powered by DuckDuckGo instead of Google. No longer loads an iframe, significantly faster site-loads, and better privacy to boot.
• Archives page works again. Did this ever work?
• Page is back to being fluid instead of fixed-width.
• Improved CSS across the board, particularly on mobile devices.
• Code page is updated.

I also managed to backport in some blog posts from the 2004-2007 era that were on the Internet Archive. For posterity!

Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me if you notice any bugs.

Here's a quick post on how I use and configure Firefox on my Macs. The last time I posted about any of this was in 2011, and things have changed a fair bit since then. First, a screenshot (from my new iMac):

Key extensions for this setup:

Vim Vixen

Vim keybindings for Firefox. Not quite as good as Vimperator, but works with modern Firefox, and getting better all the time. The only thing I really miss is macro recording, which I used all the time in Vimperator.

Tree-Style Tabs

Our monitors are widescreen; why would you try to stack tabs …

For the first time since early 2010, I have a desktop computer again!

It's a 2019 5K Retina iMac with an Intel Core i5-9600K (9th Generation, 6 physical cores), 16GB of RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 580X, and a 1TB SSD. Geekbench isn't exactly scientific, but it reports this computer as 50% faster single-core, 150% faster multi-core than the computer it's replacing.

Hello infrequent readers: here's a piece of good news for once: as of October 27th, I've moved! $SPOUSE and I now live in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley, California in a nice little two-bedroom one-and-a-half-bedroom single-family residence. It's a little surreal; even though where we live has a pretty nice mixed-use vibe (there's an apartment building around the corner, a bunch of restaurants nearby, and a Whole Foods only a few blocks away), it's still practically rural compared to the apartment in the Tendernob that I've lived in for the last eight years¹.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Twitter hasn't been a very good company in the last few years. Between the aiding and abetting of white supremacists, the continued hosting of our obnoxious orange tweeter-in-chief, and the ongoing user-hostile platform changes, it's just not as fun of a place as it was when I joined on November 14, 2007. So, uh, I'm not there any more.

No, I didn't delete my Twitter account. However, I have started trying to use a new microblogging system in its stead: Mastodon. Mastodon is an interesting idea: it's a federated social network …