Last year, my daughter and I (and some other family and friends) did a lot of camping. It was something that was difficult to do while my wife was sick, so it felt like it was a long time coming.

During the beginning of my burnout, I started getting this itch to get out somewhere truly alone — somewhere nobody could reach me and I could just sit with my own thoughts for a while. I decided I was going to go on a solo backpacking trip. The problem was, it was November, and most of our mountain areas were already buried in snow. I also wanted somewhere that would be, in my mind, "solo backpacking training wheels" — so I picked Antelope Island, a little island sitting on the East side of the Great Salt Lake. It has some mountainous terrain, but it's low enough that snow wasn't an issue yet. It's close to civilization, cell service is spotty but present, and the most dangerous thing out there is supposed to be the bison.

I ended up being spectacularly wrong about the "training wheels" part. It was an incredible trip and exactly what I needed, but there were a couple of moments where I genuinely considered hitting the emergency button on my Garmin. As you can see below, I had some unexpected visitors...

Rustaceans have been spoiled by Rust's clap (or, at least, I think they have). The derive macros, the ergonomics, the fact that you can describe an entire CLI with a struct and be done with it — it's really nice. I've never actually used (never tried Rust), but every time I see an example, I think "I wish Go had this." Go's standard flag package works, and urfave/cli is the one I reach for when I need more, but neither has that declarative feel. So I wrote glap.

Define your CLI with a struct and some tags:

type CLI struct {
    Config  string `glap:"config,short=c,required,help=Path to config file"`
    Verbose bool   `glap:"verbose,short=v,help=Enable verbose output"`
    Port    int    `glap:"port,short=p,default=8080,help=Port to listen on"`
    Output  string `glap:"output,short=o,possible=json|text|yaml,default=text,help=Output format"`
}

Parse it, use it. Subcommands, env var fallback, validators, groups, conflicts/requires, colored help, shell completions — all there. It's still beta, but it's working well for me.

I'm probably going to get a bit of flak for this, and it's probably deserved, but I'm going to type it up anyway, because I don't know where I'd be today without ChatGPT. Last year was a rough year for me (as described in the article: My Year of Loss, Grief, Burnout, and Self Reflection). While I did go to a regular/real therapist once a week for the entire year, there were still times at night when no one else was awake and I needed help, so I turned to ChatGPT. The results were surprising to me; maybe they'll be surprising to you, too.

The blog has officially been given comment support. While the articles themselves are markdown files in the repository and are pre-rendered to json during the build process, the comments are stored in a database. Authentication is provided by GitHub OAuth.

For the time being, I'm going to have it so that I need to approve comments when they are posted. Hopefully with the GitHub OAuth requirement there won't be too much spam. Guess we shall find out - that was the reason I removed comment support in the first place.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the comments from older vimtips.org articles. Not sure what happened to them. I guess when I turned them off I forgot to back them up. Oh well 😉

When I was making the current version of this blog, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter around improving load times and responsiveness on dynamic websites, complete with lots of demonstrations of instant load times even for things that access the database, like searches. I decided to see what I could pull off with this little site, served from a cheap VPS. I was able to get it to a perfect score on Lighthouse, and indeed, if you click around on the links or use the search box, you will see that things load pretty much instantly.

One year ago today at 10:30am, I opened our closet door to find that my spouse and soulmate had ended their own life in there. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the day that my life, as I knew it, was over.

I've been off work, turned off notifications, and haven't really talked to friends or family in months. This is my story of why.

In response to my last article, someone on Bluesky suggested I add an RSS feed, and so I did. You can find it here: RSS Feed.

Thanks for the suggestion!

When copying code blocks to share on GitHub or other platforms, preserving proper indentation can be tricky. I created a NeoVim function that automatically normalizes indentation when copying, making your shared code snippets clean and consistent. Here's how to set it up!

I've enhanced Neovim's character navigation motions (f, F, t, T) by integrating them with hop.nvim. The default behavior remains unchanged when there's only one occurrence of the target character, or when using a count prefix (like 3f). However, when multiple matches exist, hop.nvim automatically labels each occurrence, making it much easier to jump directly to your desired location.

I'm pretty excited about this one. I've been using EasyMotion for a long time - before NeoVim existed, and after, even though it seemed to go out of style (see https://github.com/neovim/neovim for more information about why). There are lots of alternatives, like leap.nvim, flash.nvim, sneak.nvim and etc, but they all required typing more characters, or didn't work across windows, or were just generally buggy. I stuck with EasyMotion; it just worked for me, even despite it's drawbacks. Until it didn't. Recently, it has started crashing NeoVim. I reported the issue, but no response. EasyMotion is quite old and it doesn't appear as though anyone is working on it anymore.

I found a solution, though, and that is to write a custom hop.nvim command that works like EasyMotion used to. Read the rest of the article if you want to see how to do it!

Doot is a simple, zero dependency (except Python 3, which comes installed on most *nix operating systems) task runner. Similar to make, but meant to be used for non-C style projects.

15 years or so ago, I abandoned my first opensource project, JBother and eventually let the domain expire. However, someone, I have no idea who, has rehosted the site, with my design, etc, with very little modifications. Whoever did it has not contacted me at all.

What is going on here?

There have been many plugin managers in the Vim ecosystem over the years. I've used quite a number of them, but lazy.nvim is the one I've enjoyed the most, by far. It's easy, it's concise, there's a ton of "hidden" little tricks, and it allows me to easily separate my plugin configuration into separate files (which was sort of a pain in previous plugin managers).

Most of these this information can be found in the lazy.nvim README, but without just getting your hands dirty, it can be difficult to understand how it all comes together. That's where this article comes in.

Is your iPhone 16 Pro or Max camera crashing every time you try to use it? Mine was too, but I have found a fix.

Do you use distroless? Have you tried to build a distroless docker image for your Go project, only to see an error like /bin/foo: no such file or directory? Maybe you spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why that file isn't there, only to find out that it IS there, but you're still getting the error?

This post is for you!

At the beginning of 2022, I decided I was going to learn photography. I always enjoyed taking photos with my phone, and before that, with various point and shoot cameras. I had also been avoiding something like a DSLR because they are so large and bulky. These days, though, mirrorless cameras are pretty compact, so I went for it.

I've been wanting to revive my blog for a while now, I've had a desire to write some things about NeoVim in particular. Of course, I decided to write it myself instead of using something like Medium. For me, it's an opportunity to learn something new, in this case, several new things.

I recently purchased and received a Lenovo ThinkPad x250 and immediately proceeded to install Ubuntu over whatever version of Windows it came with.

At Ender Labs, pretty much everyone but me uses a Mac. In the last year or so, I've started to realize that there must be some new Mac app or function that, via a hotkey, allows you to select an arbitrary region of your screen, create a screenshot, and then automatically uploads it to a hosting service. I know this, without doing any research, because in irc/slack/gtalk I've started receiving screenshots as responses to questions I ask. These screenshots arrive fairly quickly after said question is asked.

Welp, my simple human test, where you had to type "vim" to enter comments on this blog, finally failed to keep out the spam. Surprisingly, it did work for 6 years before I had problems.