Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

TL;DR just read this
So my current (student) job. Asked me to count inventory. Did so, on paper because nobody had a list of the product barcodes for easy cumulative scanning. I also made records for every single barcode. Then I had to key it in onto the Bookkeeping and sales software thing. They don't have keyboard shortcuts, so I quickly made an ahk script.
Had to manually type in everything 3ven though I had a digital listing.
Software lets you print barcodes for products but gives you an error when you try because you haven't assigned a code. WHICH YOU CAN'T DO IN THAT Crap. You also can't search for a product based on code.

Found out it used access as a back end for that buggy c++ thing that crashes with 'operation not permitted' when you press the red x. Great! Now I can import! And there is a barcode field. Wow. Fucking fantastic. What a fuckfest.

Their website. Their fucking website. Great from a user's standpoint, but my God. It uses joomla! However, version 2.5. That hasn't been supported for a long time. Part of the images are hard coded into the theme. The text editor flips. Adding a page sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes makes 2 pages.

And their cnc lathe runs on a laptop with Windows 3 on it, but hey, fine

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

I know this topic is tired and this isn't supposed to be a pure "REEEE SPACES BAD" kinda rant but I still don't understand why people would ever use spaces over tabs for indentation. I'm genuinely curious so please give me your arguments in favor of spaces because I just don't understand

So here's my position:
Tabs are objectively better than spaces in every single way
(I know that IDEs also do some of these for spaces, more on that later)
1. They are typed with one key press
2. They can be removed with one keypress
3. They allow for individually configurable width (some people prefer 2 and some 4 width)
4. They take up less memory (kinda irrelevant, but still)
5. You can properly navigate your code using the arrow keys which is much faster than using the mouse while typing
6. You don't have problems with accidentially having one too much or one too little
7. You don't have problems when copy pasting or moving code around (e.g. refactoring)
8. Code is much easier to select with the mouse, and
9. it's much easier clicking the right spot with the mouse where you want to continue typing, which is often at the start of a line

Apart from specific alignment, where spaces are fine (but which also almost never comes up), I just can't see a single thing where spaces are better at. So much so that most IDEs have to *pretend* that they're tabs when typing and removing them. It's so ironic yet people still defend it and big companies still use them.

I feel like I'm going mad 😨