Decade! Ten years of regular-ish publishing have passed since I published the classic “Hello there!” and it feels pretty satisfying. Regular writing is good for so many reasons, but on this one, I elaborated two years ago in “Eight years of blogging”. Thinking clarity, job opportunities, improved vocabulary, and a playground to test things out are just a few of the reasons why it is great to keep a little corner of the internet just for yourself. It was only two years ago, so it feels a bit redundant to write another article, but damn, what kind of absurdly crazy two years they were! I have some thoughts.Today a little bit ranty list of challenges for creators nowadays and how to stay motivated to pursue. It contains some spicy takes on some of the things you may swear by, but this is my blog and I can write whatever I want here. Another good thing about having a personal website.Last two yearsSince AI tools hit the masses in November 2022, all of a sudden everyone is a writer, artist,

Some time ago, Stefan shared a great tip on how to edit a long shell command using the default editor in bash and zsh. I chipped in and added a recipe for fish. I was blown away today when I learned that I can use vim keybindings directly in the fish shell, without ever opening vim. Absolutely killer productivity tip!You can enable it by adding this command to your config.fish file.set -g fish_key_bindings fish_vi_key_bindings in config.fish.Your browser doesn't support HTML video. Here is alink to the video instead.From now on you will see a new mode indicator in your prompt. As everything else in this shell, the fish_mode_prompt is highly ocnfigurable. This is the way I tweaked mine.function fish_mode_prompt switch $fish_bind_mode case default set_color green --bold echo '[N] ' case insert set_color brblack --bold echo '[I] ' case visual set_color green --bold echo '[V] ' endend

It has been a crazy month for me work-wise. Other than work and family-related responsibilities, I neglected every other area of my life in the past few weeks: blogging, hobbies, and self-care. I am on a good trajectory to slow down, and I am very much looking forward to it. I found a moment here and there to prepare a few great resources for you. I hope you will like them. Catch you next month!Album of the monthThere is not a lot of music I discovered in February other than calming ambient that I listen to when I work. But I had a few great listening sessions with my daughter and we massively enjoyed “The Struggle Continues” by Looptroop Rockers. I can’t freaking believe that this record is 23 years old! It feels like “Bandit Queen” just came out yesterday. I love this record!Top picksPatterns for Personal Web SitesThis page is a gem. A collection of patterns for personal websites by Mark L. Irons. The coolest thing about it is that it was last revised in July 2003, over two decades a

Before Neovim, I used to use Helix, which follows the same editing model as Kakoune. Having experience with both, I must admit that I prefer Helix’s selection → action editing model. It is a lot more precise and less error-prone to see the selection before taking action upon it. Although this workflow is possible in Vim, it can be inefficient.Opinions and code editor disputes aside, there is a little trick in Neovim that enables nice feedback after yanking a portion of text. Look at the example and a little Lua recipe.link to the video instead.A post yank highlight feedback emitted after yanking a word, line and a code block.vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("TextYankPost", { callback = function() vim.highlight.on_yank() end,})The highlighting group styling, timeout, and a few other things are configurable. It’s a little thing, but I found it superbly useful.While writing this post and browsing Neovim’s events reference, I came across the UserGettingBored event. It doesn’t do anything, but i

Creating new new files, deleting and moving them around is probably the second most frequent thing you use your text editor for besides writing code. Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Zed and other GUI editors use tree-like file explorers inside toggleable drawers. As much as this is useful and convenient for mouse-operable interfaces, it doesn’t really fit into the philosophy of modal editors like Neovim. We have plenty of options, so let me go through the ones I use.Three popular file explorers for Neovim: netrw, oil.nvim and neo-tree.nvimFor quick file switching, I would recommend things like telescope.nvim or Harpoon. This post is not about file switching, but file-based operations.Stop being so nit-picky, please! I understand that file managers, viewers and explorers can mean a different thing to different people, but I am going to use these terms interchangeably. A thing to do things with your files.The built-in netrwA solution preferred by many purists is the built-in plugin net

We are kicking 2025 off with a lengthy list of great resources that you shouldn’t miss. There is a bunch of CSS wisdom waiting for you here, a number of performance-related resources, and a few bits and bobs for lower-level programming enthusiasts. As always, we are kicking things off with a record recommendation that I have been listening to the most this month. Let’s go!Album of the monthI had a period of my life when I dug deeply into the Swedish rap scene. The Looptroop Rockers is still one of my favourite bands ever. Around the same time, I discovered Red Astaire, also known as Freddie Kruger or by his real name, Fredrik Lager. I can’t tell you how much I dig some of his mixes. I recently picked up cheaply in a local record store “Nuggets For The Needy Volume 3”, and it has been spinning on my record player for weeks. I recently found out that Fredrik died in June 2022 following a heart attack. Rest in peace 😔Top picksCollection of insane and fun facts about SQLitePretty cool lis...

The CSS attr() function retrieves a value from an HTML element’s attribute. Firefox added support for it two decades ago, so it’s rather not a new thing. I can’t tell you how many times I had an incredible use case for it, just to be reminded a second later that its use is limited to the content property. Here is an example.<article data-category="Technology">...</article>article::before { content: "In category: " attr(data-category);}Baseline: attr() (content only) is widely availableGoogle Chrome: 2, 2009.05.21 Microsoft Edge: 12, 2015.07.29 Firefox: 1, 2004.11.09 Safari: 3.1, 2008.03.18 The new attr() functionI’m not sure if you noticed, but in the last few years all the impossible-to-implement CSS features all of a sudden became possible. The CSS Values and Units Module Level 5 redefines the attr() function, opens its functionality to all properties, allows us to exchange a value between the markup and stylesheet that is not only limited to strings, and also accepts a fallback.<art

It was Cal’s “Digital Minimalism” that inspired me to ditch conventional social media channels, and after two years without mindless scrolling I can only recommend you do the same. “Deep Work” by the same author helped me to refocus and understand the difference between deep and shallow work. I waited patiently for a moment of downtime to read/listen to “Slow Productivity” since I heard about it for the first time on Andrew Huberman’s podcast.After talking to friends and reading plenty of 2024 reviews, the overall busyness is the common denominator. Working on multiple things at once, busy schedules, and plenty of side gigs are just a few things I hear from folks. I ended up in the same trap. How often do all these things lead to actually meaningful achievements? The new book by Cal Newport is a suggestion of a new philosophy for knowledge workers to reduce pseudo productivity by following three simple rules.Author advocates for applying three principles: do fewer things, work at the n

I recently moved from Helix to Neovim. It wasn’t too hard at first, as all the basic motions are very similar, but something didn’t feel right. Because I came from the editor that follows a selection-first approach (motion → action), I blindly kept on replicating the same in the action-first Neovim (action → motion). I have seen crazy efficient Vim programmers before, and I just knew that I needed to level up.A Mastodon user called trójkąt ▼ recommended the “Practical Vim” by Drew Neil to me. This book helped me a lot to understand the editor’s philosophy. It is a pile of hundreds of bite-sized practical tips, and it is designed to cherry-pick the bits you like. The book assumes working with a Vim core, and apart from very few exceptions, does not require any particular plugin or configuration. It is a good one to have on a bookshelf regardless of proficiency in Vim.Favourite tipsLet me share with you a few tips that I learned from the book that made me a lot more efficient. I use them

This is the last post of 2024. It was a really good year overall, but to keep an annual tradition I published “A look back at 2024” where I revealed more. It was also an interesting month. You would expect December to be a quiet month, but it was full of interesting releases, and a bunch of great resources came out. Other than that, I also have some great music recommendations for you folks.Before you jump into top picks and music recommendations, I would like to wholeheartedly wish you a happy and healthy 2025.Album of the monthSometimes spontaneous click-around on Bandcamp can lead to a good exploration. That was the case with my favourite album of December, Damu The Fudgemunk – Peace of Action. Mainly a jazz record, but heavily inspired by the hip hop nuggets here and there. You can tell that it was produced by a hip hop beats producer! Sourced from KPM (and associated music libraries), the selection makes it a truly unique compilation that just makes you want to listen from start t