I’m very happy to come back after a long year. I hope to keep this blog going for longer this time. For this comeback writing, I would like to introduce a few productivity softwares that served me very well recently.
SpaceVIM deserves its own dedicated note. Here I will try to summarize the most basic usage and most useful tips and tricks in using SpaceVIM. If you are interested in learning advanced features of SpaceVIM, you can check out their documentation at SpaceVIM documentation.
The four cornerstones in the design of SpaceVIM are mnemonic, discoverable, consistent, and crowd-configured.
VIMium is an open-source google-chrome extension that allows you to navigate the web browser with Vim key bindings. It turns google-chrome into a keyboard-driven software. For a long time, web browser and PDF viewer are the only two reasons I keep a mouse on my desk. It’s no longer the case as I found VIMium and Zathura (a VIM-like document viewer). Now, there is a small number of websites that VIMium does not (fully) support. This issue can be easily overcome if you know the normal chrome key bindings (like Alt + TAB_NUMBER).
VIMium can be download from Chrome Web Store or from the author’s github. There are not much to config to just use the extension. The author did a good job in transfering the Vim key bindings and make them work for a web browser. Of course, there are so much flexibility if you want to tailor the keybinds to your liking, but I find I live well with what VIMium deliver by default.
The keybinds that I used the most with VIMium are
f/F to view all the links. If you type the follow-up letters in lowercase (no Shift +) then the corresponding link will be opened in the current tab, otherwise (Shift + FOLLOW_UP) it will be opened in a new tab, right next to the current tab.o/O to search keywords or go to a URL. Again, just like f/F, the lowercase o will open the new website in the current tab, while the uppercase O will open a new tab.j/k and d/u to navigate the website vertically. j/k does line-by-line while d/u goes by half of the view. Just like Vim, gg to go up to the very beginning of the website and G to get to the bottom of it.t to open new tab. x to close the current tab. T search through the open tabs, J/K to move to the tab on the left/right respectively./ to enter search mode, n/N to move forward/backward among matches.Those are basically all you need to browse the Web. If you need advanced nagivating, copy/paste features, you can always toggle the help pop-up by ?. Everything is exactly like Vim. I haven’t even to try out the advanced options that VIMium offers. I will update this if I find new, interesting feature.
Tiling window managers are great tool to save up your monitor real estate as well as gearing toward a keyboard-driven experience. My choice is AwesomeWM. Its configuration is written in lua but even if you’re never heard of lua, it’s simple enough for you to start tweaking with a few Google searches. There are a lot of themes to choose from and it’s quite easy to customize them to your preferences. Key bindings are a breaze to set-up or change and they come with built-in documentation/user-manual that you can toggle in a keys stroke. I think this is one of the best features of AwesomeWM, it helps new users learn the ways around Awesome very quickly.