tools

I picked up Build Websites with Hugo because I’m a PragProg loyalist with plans to revive my old blog, and if they have a book on something I’m using, I like to have an opinion on it. My opinion is that it’s fine, but barely. The book is from 2020, and Hugo has changed enough since then that half the examples either don’t work or generate deprecation warnings. I was running Hugo 0.164 against a book written for 0.68, and the scaffolding generated by hugo new theme is completely different now, so it actively conflicted with the book’s instructions at nearly every step. ...

So, I promised I’d mention what goodies I find in the second half of Practical Vim, 2nd Edition. Here they are. Chapter 10, Copy and Paste First, the repetition of the insert mode <C-r>{register} command later in the book was something I found useful. I think that’s a pretty handy way to paste the contents of a register. I never knew that "+ let’s you access the system clipboard either. If you put the two together, you can quickly paste from the system clipboard without leaving insert mode with <C-r>+. The fact that yank stores a copy of what it copies in the 0 register is pretty handy too. Nice to have an alternate way to access the last yank if I’ve clobbered it. ...

Practical Vim is an excellent resource for tips and trick for using vim. It focuses on core vim features, and doesn’t spend any room talking about plugins. Aside from a few hints to how .vimrc settings might affect certain commands, it doesn’t spend any time telling you what to put in your .vimrc. It does have an appendix about vimrc settings, in case you need some new ones. The book is laid out as a series of 123 mostly standalone tips, although they do follow a procession of least to most difficult within their respective section. The tips are split between 20 sections. The book doesn’t attempt to go into Vimscript. Overall, I found it a useful collection of mostly non-obvious tips for using vim, and I feel like it has made me more capable in using my editor of choice. ...

Well, I promised I would review Command Line Power User the other day when I did the Mastering Markdown video, so here it is. This is probably a better video series to give me an opinion of his teaching skills, since it isn’t something I know entirely and is actually a little over an hour of video. Each video is longer also, so it probably won’t annoy me so much when the video player scrolls down to where I can’t see the video after switching files. ...

Well, for something a little different, I decided to write my opinion of a free video course. Since I’m writing my blog in markdown, I figured why not review it with something other than the Kramdown cheatsheet. Wes Bos has a number of video courses, some free and some paid for. His Mastering Markdown course is one of the free ones. It’s really only a single 23 minute video, so not much of a course, but since he just came out with a Learn Node course and has another longer free course of Javascript projects, I figured why not try the little course to get a feel for his teaching style and see if I want to invest any more time and/or money in more of his courses later. His other free courses if you’re interested include Command Line Power User which has some Z shell tips that I might check out, since I’m sure I’m not making the most of it, and JavaScript 30 which is 30 days of building 30 things in vanilla JS (which promises no frameworks, no compilers, no libraries, and no boilerplate). Unless this one is terribly, I’ll probably sit through the command line one after this. The JavaScript 30 one I’ll only invest time in if I like these two. Well, without further ado, here’s my opinion of Mastering Markdown. ...