ZS LT HORVÁTH

Tales of Computering™

Two Weeks of Computering™

There is no single topic for today’s heroic tale, but rather a collection of small things I did over the past two weeks. Some are Neovim-related, some QMK-related, all computering™-related.

Vim Configuration File for Neovim

I am quite a big fan of Termux on Android (yes, even with the existence of an official virtualized Linux environment), and I use a frugal dev environment on it. I wanted to try Neovim with my existing Vim configuration. Although it’s possible to configure Neovim with Lua, it still supports the legacy Vim approach. There are multiple ways to handle this: .vimrc could be a symlink to init.vim, but I created a separate init.vim that sources the .vimrc file.

The contents of ~/.config/nvim/init.vim are:

if filereadable(expand("~/.vimrc"))
  source ~/.vimrc
endif
colorscheme retrobox

I mostly use grep and ctags for code navigation, linters and compilers as makeprgs, and formatters as external commands. All that works wonderfully in Neovim as well, which is not surprising at all, but still cool.

QMK Layout Chores

A couple of months ago, I had to revise my QMK layout for my Keychron K11, because I was a dumdum and deleted/repurposed the default Win/Mac layers. Now that I use a Mac as well, it became a problem. I handled this, but I still had two other layouts to update. I thought this work was beneath me, so I started to write a markdown file with the steps, planning to force agents to deal with this issue.

Then the magic happened, when I finished the markdown file, I realized that I could do the whole thing by hand from the top of my head. So I brewed a coffee and spent an hour just editing the layouts. It could be argued that this was a waste of time, but it was chill as heck, and I still love to use computers, sue me. Personally, doing things by hand is still an important skill for me.

I Should Sit on this Tree

When the new release of Neovim (0.12) came out, I wanted to check how my config held up. Since 0.9, I’ve never remade my configuration, I usually handle only errors and deprecation warnings. There’s a reason for this: since 0.11, more and more features are being added that make a minimal setup more and more viable. So I want to wait for a release that has almost everything I need out of the box, and then I’ll rethink my configuration.

Treesitter is a programming language parser, giving Neovim the ability to understand the structure of code, improving syntax highlighting, indentation, code folding, blah blah blah. There’s a plugin that handles the integration, but it’s been rewritten, and the new version is only compatible with Neovim 0.12.

The old version had the capability to automatically install parsers from a list, or when opening a file with a filetype that didn’t yet have a parser. It also started automatically if there was a parser for the filetype. The new version does not have these features, and it won’t, because the maintainer got tired of maintaining them. For a time I just used the old version, but now I had to update.

I set up the Treesitter plugin according to the documentation and added back what I missed:

To my surprise, the treesitter-context (which shows method/class context at the top of the window) and treesitter-textobjects (which provides text objects based on the syntax tree) plugins still work without any changes.

My setup also got a new tool: tree-sitter-cli, a command-line utility to manage parsers, which needed to be installed separately.

Looking back at what I’ve done, it doesn’t seem too complicated (and it isn’t), but I did have to spend some time navigating the waves GitHub issues to gather context and figure out what to do.

…

Most of these problems were chores, self-inflicted problems by software developers for software developers. I could be sour about this, but I’m sweet.