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    Switching back from Emacs to Neovim

    I started off as a vim cultist and used it for practically everything. At the time I was primarily doing C development on my own small codebases. However, after needing to do development on larger typescript codebases for work, my needs got to be more complex. The biggest thing missing for me was a LSP. For this reason, I started using neovim as my IDE and gradually shifted over for all software related tasks. I still occasionally used vim for simple text editing.

    At a certain point, I was just bored and decided to give emacs a shot. It has a lot of great defaults and feels pleasant to use after getting evil mode and my own vim bindings configured. I also really enjoyed some of the emacs plugins, especially org-tree-slide, it made giving presentations awesome and I used it for my rust workshop.

    However, I did not like a lot about my emacs experience:

    • Performance: felt very sluggish compared to vim/nvim
    • LSPs constant crashing: when working with rust projects, rust analyzer would constantly crash and ask to be restarted, making for a painful experience
    • Buffer switching keeps showing random buffers I did not open myself like *scratch*, *straight-process* and a billion others, tried a bunch of stuff to fix this
    • Clipboard pasting is slow and blocks
    • Emacs takes a while to start up
    • Haven't found nice way to reload init.el when I make a change, makes prototyping/experimenting with options more difficult
    • The last straw was when emacs started terminating for no reason whatsoever

    In general, my todo list of emacs improvements involves fixes with the editor rather than further advancements and features I could be adding to my workflow. In the end, it feels more like I was fighting the editor, this may just be perhaps that I come from vim and expect emacs to behave more like vim.

    Overall I'm really impressed by a lot of the things emacs is capable of but for now I just want a fast and productive IDE to write software with. I'm too lazy to keep fighting emacs - although I'm sure it's a great editor if I learned how to use it properly. I'll come back one day...

    Yet another blog rewrite

    fn main() {
    println!("hello world");
}

    So somehow I have managed to rewrite my blog once again. This time we are using zola, which is a static site generator written in rust. It's pretty nice since you can do everything in markdown and it comes with a bunch of features like search index, syntax highlighting etc. I have finally caved in and decided to use modern technologies for once instead of the insanity of what I was working with before.

    First blog was a very long time ago when I wanted to learn django. This was unfinished so it doesn't really count.

    Next is this shell script that tacks on new blog posts to an existing file. It worked okay but got annoying when I wanted to change up the format of the blog pages or wanted to edit stuff. It was a reasonable project since I was learning shell scripting. I actually made a decent couple posts using this blog system.

    After this was when I became mentally ill. Here is a makefile based blog script that is more or less finished. It started off quite elegant with me using envsubst to do variable substitutions in md files as templating. It then spiraled into me trying to write a templating engine in makefile complete with a md to html generator written in sed. Honestly if I polished up this project and finished the sed script it could be a pretty decent and lightweight static blog generator.

    Needless to say, I got a bit tired of writing shell scripts for my blogs and just wanted something that works and has all the features I wanted. So that's why I'm using a prebuild tool for once. Perhaps if I get bored I'll write another blog script but we shall see 😋.