The Stochastic Game

The Official Lawrencium Website

Just a quick update to say that the official Lawrencium website is now live.

For the few people who care about it but have memory issues, Lawrencium is my Mercurial plugin for Vim.

Announcing PieCrust For Vim

After my Mercurial plugin for Vim, Lawrencium, here’s my second official Vim plugin! You won’t be surprised to know it’s a PieCrust plugin which adds a few commands that make it easier to work on your website. It’s of course named “vim-piecrust” and is available on BitBucket.

Well, actually, at the moment it’s only got on command: Pcedit. You will need the latest PieCrust to make it work. When you do, typing :Pcedit something<tab> in Vim will bring an autocomplete list that contains any page, post or template that contains “something” in its filename. It makes it very quick to edit files in your website.

I’ll add more commands in the future of course.

Showing off your dotfiles

With the introduction of my first Apple laptop a few years ago, my home computers went from being half Unix-like (I had a healthy mix of Linux and Windows machines) to mainly (two thirds) Unix-like. With it came a change in the kind of software I use on a daily basis and an increased need to synchronize the configuration of those programs between my machines.

Enter the “dotfiles community”: an informal group of people who, as Zach Holman puts it, think that “dotfiles are meant to be forked”.

“Dotfiles” are rooted in Unix culture — the name refers to the configuration files starting with a dot that clutter your home directory like crazy. This means you will mostly find Mac and Linux users in there (that’s ok, they’re pretty nice… usually), but to me it’s mostly about putting all your configuration files in source control in a way that makes it easy to setup new machines and share with others.

So like everybody else, I put my dotfiles out there for anyone to poke around. They’re mostly boring, but you may find a few useful things, like those I outline below (after the break). Nothing earth-shattering, but if it saves you the 15 minutes needed to write it, that’s 15 minutes you can spend on doing actual stuff.

Lawrencium -- A Mercurial Wrapper For Vim

I’ve been using Vim for quite a while now, and by no means am I an expert in it (I’m still learning all kinds of cool tricks every week), but I recently decided it was time to write my first plugin. And because I mostly use Vim at home, where I work with Mercurial, I figured I could write a Mercurial plugin for Vim.

Steve Losh had been asking for such a plugin for quite some time so I thought that might be helpful to at least another guy besides me. And ironically enough, I started learning Vimscript with Steve’s very own book-in-progress, “Learn Vimscript the hard way”.

The result of this initiative is Lawrencium, which is available on Bitbucket and at Vim.org.

There’s a good description of how it works on the Bitbucket page, and you’ll see it’s inspired in some parts by Tim Pope’s Fugitive plugin, which wraps Git workflows and features inside Vim.

It’s still a work in progress so be sure to leave some feedback here or in the issue tracker.

PieCrust code changes

There’s been some big changes in the PieCrust codebase recently: some refactoring to make unit-testing easier, the creation of a second branch, and the creation of a satellite repository for the application’s code alone.

You won’t care much about the first one (the refactoring) although you may have to expect a whole bunch of new bugs, which will hopefully be easy to test and fix since the whole point of this refactoring is to make testing easier. The other changes are important, however:

• There’s a new stable branch which will, well, be kept as stable as possible. This means that new features introduced in the default branch will stay there for a little while until they’re merged into stable. This branching policy is simple yet quite common, as explained by Steve Losh.

• The “PieCrust Sample” repository now contains the partial history of the main repository. Yeah, I’ve decided to read the Mercurial documentation and found that the hg convert command is pretty useful in this case.

• The new “PieCrust App” repository contains only the PieCrust app’s code in the root directory. This is useful if you want to include it as a sub-repository of your website’s repository — e.g. in a _piecrust directory. This way, you don’t need mix the PieCrust files with your own, and you can easily update by pulling the sub-repo. This one is also mirrored on GitHub in case you don’t want a Mercurial sub-repo for some reason.