Week Notes 12
In this post...
Testing out Helix as my new text editor
I first tried out Helix several years ago before I even gave Neovim a real shot. I’ve seen a few posts pop up about Helix this past week, so I had the idea to ditch Neovim and give it another go.
To give some context, my use case for terminal text editors is mostly just writing posts for the blog or editing config files. Nothing too complicated. These days if I’m writing code I’m usually firing up VS Code. It’s just easy to use and is well supported.
So far I’ve written this post and my last one using Helix. I really appreciate that Helix tries to include a lot of modern functionality without relying on plugins. Maintaining my config and plugin list was by far my least favorite thing about Neovim. Helix’s config is much more straightforward and there’s less of it. Not to mention it’s probably a good thing security-wise to not be depending on dozens of plugins.
One thing that concerns me though is that Helix’s keybindings are similar but not at all identical to Vim’s. It’s just enough to mess with your muscle memory. I do get the feeling that Helix’s bindings are technically better, but the thing with Vim is that you can’t escape it. Chances are it’s already installed on any system you’ll need to do work on. Time will tell if my Helix muscle memory will be a problem next time I need to do something with Vim.
I registered for a Blood Bowl tournament
A group of friends is putting on a Blood Bowl tournament (think Warhammer + American Football) so I decided to join in. I’ve only ever played half a game so I expect I’ll be leaning pretty heavily on pure luck. My team of Dwarves will hopefully at least make sure I don’t go down without a fight! I’m hoping to get at least one more practice game in before we officially start.
I finished Breaking Bad
The last season of Breaking Bad went by more quickly than just about any other season of TV I’ve watched. We were watching three episodes some nights and it was hard to even limit it to that. Overall it’s just a great show and it’s been a thrill throughout. Plenty of interesting characters and developments.
We also watched El Camino, a movie that follows one of the main characters immediately after the events of the show. That one’s also great. It leaves things in a good spot and pretty much feels like a long episode of the show which are both things that I was hoping for.
Of course the plan now is to start Better Call Saul pretty soon. Some people I’ve talked with actually like it better than the original show so I’m excited. Of course, I’d be looking forward to it anyway just being familiar now with some of the characters it follows.
— JP