Tool configuring (and an old word processor)
Today there isn't much to write about and I wouldn't like to use any of my filler articles either. If I had stashed all of my blog posts into the filler directory I probably would have not published half of them. So it's time to write a new. For few weeks it has happened like this:
~/blog$ cd $(./blog monday -c)~/blog/www/entries/2018/nov/12$ mkdir tools~/blog/www/entries/2018/nov/12$ cd tools~/blog/www/entries/2018/nov/12/tools$ gvim index.md
The 'blog' is a small script that can tell me the directory for today or monday. If I give it a '-c' it also creates one before telling where it is.
I've had some fun tuning my tools recently.
Here are the latest additions into the .vimrc which tells
how my text editor should operate:
" Tired to the random colorscheme, lets use 'blue' for a while.colorscheme blue" Fast, low blinking cursor feels nice when having a typing prompt.set guicursor=n:blinkwait0-blinkon250-blinkoff250set guicursor=i:blinkwait20-blinkon100-blinkoff100-hor20
After the changes the editor looks like this:
If you've tried vim, you know that the __INSERT__ mode is
the mode where you're writing text.
The cursor is blinking when it's in the insert mode,
pressing shift-key stops the blinking for some reason.
I also ended up dropping the blinking from the normal mode entirely.
Not sure why it happened but after doing these changes I find it easier to work. I especially enjoy watching the cursor blink as I type. I don't know how long I handle the blue background, but it isn't the worst colorscheme I could find.
Where did I snatch these from? I went 30 years back in time to play with WordPerfect 5.0. Here's a screencap for a comparison:
While playing around in this environment for a short while, I ended up thinking the colors and the cursor were quite fun. It took about 30 minutes to end up with that conclusion.
The software itself was also fairly nice to work with. It's got this alphabetically ordered help menu so you really don't need to learn more than one keypress about it to start using:
People slowly learned the keypresses and while that had happened a disaster struck. The fools destroyed all of this while chasing the trends. When WordPerfect 6.0 were released, it was deprecated to become history.
The another inspiring feature of this old editor was the ability to 'reveal codes'.
This was actually the thing I was looking for. It had been in the WordPerfect since its introduction.
Today's hatred toward WYSIWYG comes from simple things. It comes from the failure to learn from the past and not include the features that made word processing tolerable back then. The another aspect is the overemphasis on final result.
A word processing software should be good for text production. The produced output should be suitable for further processing in a publishing software.