Technology

Helix Cheat Sheet I am developing master of the Helix text editor. This document is notes relating to wrapping my head around some major paradigm shifts in learning a unique editor and in no way replaces the Helix documentation. With vim-like-editors, there are so many ways to do things, it is overwhelming. Be prepared to dedicate some time to get to know the editor. Start with the basic movement commands so you can at least move around. Then as you encounter situations where you think, “It would be nice if…”, there is probably a way to do it. Stop and add that new set of keystrokes to your arsenal. There are four primary editor modes in helix: command, normal, insert, and select. The mode is indicated in the lower left of the statusline at the bottom of the screen. The modes you see are: “INS”: insert mode; “SEL”: select mode; “NOR”: normal mode. Command mode doesn’t have a status indicator since these commands are executed directly. ...

To set up language support for helix, there are two things that need to be done. First, you will need to install the LSP language server for your desired language. Second, configure the language server in the languages.toml file. The language file is stored in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml Along the way, I started getting a TOML warning in languages.toml that my file was not set up correctly. In the end, moving all the [[languages]] sections above all the [language-server] items cleared up the issue. ...

A newsreader or RSS reader is an application that allows you to read “feeds” from various websites. This can really help you stop blindly surfing the web, yet catch up on the latest articles from sites you care about. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Newsboat I’m going with newsboat for this category. Newsboat Documentation Installation When looking at the install options, it did not look pretty. From their documentation page, snap packages were mentioned, but I don’t use those with my Linux distro. Newsboat is also not available in my package manager. Their next suggestions was download and compile from source code. That would be a real pain, so wasn’t interested in that. ...

A file manager is a tool that helps you keep your filesystem in order. There are some really good ones for the terminal. Sure, learning system commands for managing your files is really important, but mastering a terminal file manager just takes things to another level. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Yazi, Ranger, and LF have a very similar look and feel and are excellent. Midnight Commander has a much different look and feel. For that reason alone, it is worth taking a look. ...

Looks like there are several tools available for the command line that provide plain text accounting. I am starting out with hledger to see how I like it. Unfortunately, I really know very little about accounting practices. So, this will really be a learning experience. So, to help with my accounting learning, my plan is to simultaneously set up the GUI application GnuCash and work with it in parallel. Listed below are the three CLI tools, hledger, ledger, and beancount. This is such a huge topic with so much to learn, I’ve decided to start with hledger as it seems at first glance to be the robustest of the three. ...

There are many ways to do calculations from the command line. Here are a couple that are worthwhile. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Qalc Qalc is the command line version of Qalculate. I was able to install just the command line version through my distributions package manager. Qalc Documentation It supports an interactive mode as well as a simple command line mode. Nice thing about these kinds of calculators, they can be used to do calculations in a script. ...

CLI Podcast management tool. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Castero Castero Source Code Since I’m using uv, I installed it with uv tool install castero. This app is simple and easy to use. It supports importing and exporting OPML files of podcasts which is the standard for maintaining feeds like this. The default configuration file is stored in ~/.config/castero/castero.conf. The default key bindings for navigating through the application are the arrow keys. So, the main thing I did there was to change those keys to be vim motions equivalents (h, j, k, l). ...

Is a music player really a productivity application? Well, if it helps you focus, then that’s a good thing. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Cmus Cmus Home Page Cmus Source Code To get started, check out the man page man cmus-tutorial. Views There are seven different views in CMUS. Each view can be accessed by pressing a number key. ...

Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Terminal Web Browsers? Yes, you can browse the web from the terminal. But it ain’t pretty. When checking out terminal web browsers, you will definitely need to check out the fine documentation because navigating links, open new pages, going back, etc. will drive you nuts without having a handy keyboard reference. But, really? The web is so graphics heavy and script heavy the mileage you get from a terminal browser is limited. So, unless there is a special use case like terrible bandwidth, it’s better to just use a GUI browser. So, I don’t really anticipate filling out a lot more info on this page. ...

Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. As I look into terminal calendars, I remember the days when I had one of those desktop blotter calendars. When I worked for a big company, they specified the software we had to use for email and meetings. So, if you didn’t like their toolset, too bad. You had to live with it. ...