Wandering Thoughts archives

2010-01-31

More vim options it turns out that I want

Much to my displeasure, Ubuntu seems to have been steadily making the version of vim that they ship more and more superintelligent. I do not want a superintelligent vi; in fact, superintelligence is a net negative in vim, because unlike with GNU Emacs it is almost always wrong. So, unlike the first set of vim options, these are negative options that I need, things that turn off settings.

So far, I have wound up with:

set formatoptions=l
Turns off automatic line wrapping. Since vi is my sysadmin's editor and sysadmins edit configuration files a lot, automatic line wrapping is anti-feature.

(I hate it in Emacs too, when it happens.)

let loaded_matchparen = 1
Turns off blinking matched delimeters, like () and [] and so on. I find this irritating and distracting.

filetype plugin off
This turns off all sorts of superintelligent automatic formatting that I aggressively don't want.

(At some point I may look into the best way to fix the line ending issue, but I haven't been annoyed enough yet.)

Some reading in the vim help files suggests that 'set paste' will also do a lot to turn off all of the superintelligence that I so dislike. Using Ubuntu's 'tiny' version of vim also goes a long way to disabling various things I don't like, but it has the side effect of making vim not like the latter two .vimrc settings here (and it's not something that I can turn on globally on our systems and so have all the time, no matter what environment or UID I am at the moment).

All in all, I really wish vim had a mode where it just settled for being a better vi instead of trying to be a bad imitation of GNU Emacs. As before, if I want GNU Emacs, I know where to find it.

linux/VimOptionsII written at 23:02:28; Add Comment

Thinking about syndication feeds and spoilers

DWiki has always had the ability to do the common blog thing of 'click here to see the rest of the entry'; when I put it in, I expected to use it for things like the detailed stats at the end of this entry. Because I am crazy that way, I built the feature so that it could apply on the main page (pages, really), in syndication feed entries, or both, depending on what options I turned on in any particular entry.

In practice, it turned out that I really don't like using cuts in syndication feed entries, for at least two reasons. First, syndication feed readers already have good ways to skip parts of entries and even whole entries (or at least they should), which makes cutting for volume mostly unnecessary. Second, partial entries are in annoying in general because they effectively force you out of your syndication feed reader and into your browser in order to read the full entry.

(In fact it turns out that I don't like cuts very much in general, so I barely use them even on the main pages.)

However, this does leave one case unhandled: spoilers. Places like the anime blogging community have come up with decent Javascript-based solutions for people who are reading your main site, but this is a complete non-starter in syndication feeds. In fact you can't even count on the old 'set the colour of the text to the background colour' trick, as modern syndication feed readers can strip styling as well.

My reluctant conclusion is that handling spoilers may well call for using a cut even in syndication feeds, with the annoyance of having to click off to read the entry being the lesser of two evils. The other approach is just to note that there will be spoilers at the start of an entry and count on people to use their feed reader's 'skip to next entry' feature.

(Spoilers are not generally relevant to WanderingThoughts, but they sometimes come up for me elsewhere.)

tech/CutsInSyndicationFeeds written at 01:39:52; Add Comment


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