vim

There’s gotta be something better than markdown for notes, though

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We keep switching back and forth between vim + wiki.vim and Obsidian. Vim is a text editor, the bloody fastest there is at it, made better now that we’re more or less efficient with a bunch of commands and keyboard combinations. And now that we actually have a somewhat decent implementation of our dotfiles being kept in our git server (aka not github) we can keep my vimrc file the same pretty much everywhere.

But Obsidian is just so convenient… Looks and runs exactly the same on Windows, Linux, and Android! You just run the application and open the vault. Their iOS version will not open my notes vault which is kept on my Nextcloud instance.

I’m sticking to Obsidian for now mostly because it does let me see images in it’s preview mode and on that it does have vim beat. If you need to edit text table nothing beats vim-table-mode.

There’s gotta be something better than markdown for notes, though Read More »

wiki.vim update

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Alright so after a while we just got tired of vimvwiki and vim-pandoc-syntax fighting over syntax formatting and coloring and we weren’t using all the features available in vimwki so ended up switching to wiki.vim and it’s working out pretty good after we switched the journal configuration from daily to monthly with these settings:

Plugin 'lervag/wiki.vim'
let g:wiki_root = '~/Nextcloud/wiki.vim/' " Have wiki live inside Nextcloud
let g:wiki_filetypes = ['md']             " markdown wiki
let g:wiki_link_extension = '.md'         " markdown wiki
let g:wiki_link_target_type = 'md'        " markdown wiki
let g:wiki_write_on_nav = 1               " Write to disk when navigating from file to file
let g:wiki_journal = { 'frequency': 'monthly', 'date_format': { 'monthly': '%Y-%m'}} " Set to journal monthly

The notes are also in the vimrc file cos we know we’ll forget what each specific setting does. Also, why do vim plugin authors think the vim help file is enough? At least have the fucken decency of making it into HTML so you can link to specific bits of it. We hate reading documentation in vim itself when there are much better solutions out there.

But anyways.

We’re using the barest of features cos we don’t really know enough vim commands but we’re already plenty quick with the ones we know. Now we’re trying to figure out what would happen if we stick this wiki into a git repository and manage it that way, which would be awesome for a todo list.

So what we’ve got right now is usually two windows side by side, one for the todo.md file and the other one for the journal for that month. It’s working out pretty well as long as we remember to do a :wa to write all files to disk so Nextcloud doesn’t complain about version differences between server and clients.

Nextcloud itself is still working pretty good. The VM host it lives in will get rebuilt and I’m thinking I’ll migrate from Ubuntu to Debian when I setup a new VM for it.

Aaaah what else was there…? Ah yeah, got three jerbs now

  • Barista
  • Host
  • Sysadmin

The todo.md file mentioned above didn’t even exist until three days ago cos it wasn’t needed but now it absolutely is. Stuff is put on paper first (can’t have phone out at barista/host jobs without a manager complaining), then it goes into the file. It’s working out pretty well. Yes there are apps like Google Tasks, Todoist, Google Keep, Notion but they’re all just so slow and then you’re committed to their own specific way of doing things.

No thanks, I’ll just keep everything in text files cos plain text is forever.

Going back to the jobs… life is going to be absolute mayhem for a few months or until we break and get fired from one, which personally hope is the barista jerb— main clientele will be law enforcement and en’t nobody got time for abuse from those entities.

Ah yes! Another useful tool is barinsta. The regular Instagram app just kept giving me ads and that gets so annoying. The interface harkens back to the initial releases of touchscreen apps but the developer makes it very clear they want you to be conscious of your actions while using the app. The fact you don’t get any ads is just an extra benefit of that. Thanks to it it’s super quick to catch up on my feed instead of spending an hour and still be missing stuff. Install it from F-Droid and if you see anyone trying to put it up on Google Play, report it to the devs.

Other than that we’re also trying to post to Flickr more often. We’re paying for it, might as well use it.

Pretty sure that’s it for now.

wiki.vim update Read More »

S P E E D

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The core interaction of your product – Your product exists to save people time or help them solve a problem. Introducing friction or delay during the most important flow of your product will drive people crazy. Notion has developed a reputation for being a sluggish product:

Source: Speed is the killer feature – bdickason.com

I wanted to love Notion. I did! It’s everything you’d want in a note-taking app. But it’s fucken slow, which made me hate it.

This is why I stick with vim and wiki.vim— This just made me realize I haven’t updated that series of blog posts.

S P E E D Read More »

vim with rclone on MFA-enabled Nextcloud

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I forgot that I enabled MFA on my Nextcloud instance and it broke rclone. This is something the Nextcloud documentation makes clear but neither the instance nor rclone itself will tell you what’s actually wrong or how to fix it.

First, on Nextcloud:

  1. Go to Settings › Security.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom. Enter something descriptive like “rclone” in the entry box, then click Generate App Password.
  3. Nextcloud will display an application-specific password. Leave the screen here. Nextcloud will only display it the one time

You can always start over if you don’t copy it so depending on your password policies you might want to save it in your password manager.

Now, switch over to your shell:

  1. First, kill the current rclone mount: $ fusermount -u /home/nullrend/Nextcloud. Do not just kill the rclone job. Apparently the rclone devs think it’s too hard to implement a rclone umount /mount/dir command or sum’thin’.
  2. Do $ rclone config and delete the current Nextcloud remote endpoint. Much easier to start from scratch.
  3. When you get to the password entry, enter the password given to you by Nextcloud.
  4. Finish the process.

At this point you can save the password on Nextcloud so it actually allows rclone to connect through WebDAV.

To mount the new remote endpoint do something like $ rclone mount endpoint:/ ~/Nextcloud --daemon --dir-cache-time 120m --max-read-ahead 256 --no-modtime --vfs-cache-mode full --vfs-cache-poll-interval 120m. You will need to play with the caching flags depending on what you’re doing and what your needs are.

For my own use case I’m mostly using vim to interact with my vimwiki files so I also often do :set noswapfile to stop vim from bitching about files that are likely open elsewhere.

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Another attempt at a note-taking workflow

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In a previous post I mentioned one of the tools I use is Wiki.js. It was a great thing to learn how to set it up but… I was never entirely happy with it:

  • It’s somewhat slow on loading.
  • Not that customizable yet.
  • The update process is a total pain in the ass. They want you to use Docker and this ‘ere server can run it but performance wouldn’t be that nice.
  • On mobile I have to depend on the vagaries of whatever browser I’m using (Firefox) so I don’t get that good of an editing interface.
  • This is a private repository of knowledge so if it turns out wiki.js has a security issue my wiki is now at risk until I go through the pain of updating again.

So that’s that. I’d been playing with vimwiki since it’s text-based. After a bit of playing I was able to make it work nicely on the gVim instance I run on the Windows 10 desktop and the Ubuntu instance I run in WSL.

The mobile side of things was immensely helped along by Epsilon Notes, which blows iA Writer completely out of the water. Along the way I tried using Joplin which at first glance seems awesome but then you run into this issue:

Screencapture of JoplinApp filenames

Yes, I get the logic of completely unique filenames but it also means that I’m locked into the app. This is something people have complained about as it defeats all efforts at interoperability. I mean, these are fucken markdown files. And this is an open source app!

Oh right, it also uses its own WebDAV connection to the Nexcloud instance, so slow your roll.

So back to Epsilon. It’s got a few goodies:

  • Line numbers
  • CommonMark is the default markdown dialect.
  • It’s native to Android.
  • Let’s you use front matter for tags but doesn’t require it. I personally don’t care for it.
  • It sets up its own folder in the device filesystem which you can then sync with Nextcloud.

The workflow

All right, so this is what I have right now

vim/gvim

Assuming there’s already a working Windows gVim instance, a working WSL installation, and a working Nextcloud desktop client:

  1. Setup vim with vimwiki.
  2. Configure vimwiki to store its files in a directory being synced by the Nextcloud desktop client. For the sake of simplicity and avoid changing my .vimrc file unnecesarily in WSL/ubuntu I symlinked ~/vimwiki to the appropriate directory in Windows; this way the _vimrc file in gVim could remain the same. Using either vim instance gets me to the same location.
  3. Create your vimwiki index file: <Leader>ww, and save it. It should get picked up by Nextcloud.

Nextcloud

Using the web interface or the Android client, mark the vimwiki folder as a favorite so Nextcloud keeps it synced at all times. I don’t think there’s a way to do this in the desktop client yet.

Epsilon Notes

Assuming there’s already a working Nextcloud app

  1. Install Epsilon from the Play Store.
  2. Tap the folder icon on the top right and navigate to /storage/emulated/0/Android/media/com.nextcloud.client/nextcloud/USER@HOST/vimwiki/. If you have multiple Nextcloud accounts on the same app you’ll see all of those listed with a USER@HOST folder each and you can just jump between folders.

Another way of doing this is setting up custom folders but I think doing it this way makes for a simpler configuration. It’d probably be really useful you have multiple vimwikis or multiple Nextcloud accounts though.

Bonus: Servers

I have a couple of boxes that run headless and I also wanted to have my notes available on there. There isn’t a terminal Nextcloud client but I found Rclone. I could have used cadaver but Rclone is designed specifically for cloud file storage:

These instructions worked under my Debian 10 install:

  1. Install rclone and fuse3: sudo aptitude install rclone fuse3.
  2. Configure Rclone with rclone config. Documentation.
  3. Create an Rclone mount with something like
rclone --vfs-cache-mode writes mount NEXTCLOUD:/vimwiki ~/vimwiki --daemon

Which assumes NEXTCLOUD is what you named the remote configuration, your vimwiki directory lives at $HOME, and you want the connection to remain alive until you decide to stop it manually. The --vfs-cache-mode writes flag will enable some amount of caching. Documentation.
4. At this point you can access your vimwiki as if they were on the local filesystem.

Fucken awesome amirite

SO now we have wiki-like notes that can be edited on desktop, mobile, or server, using whichever editor you prefer. Another bonus: You’re not locked in to anything. I could edit notes on desktop with Notepad++, Sublime Text, or Atom. On mobile you can edit them with whatever text editor you end up with. On a server you can edit them natively with whatever you have at hand.

And in the sad event you don’t have anything you can still access them through the Nextcloud web interface. They even got a markdown editor but I’m not sure what dialect it uses.

The only thing I dont have anymore is a nice clean way to print these notes but this is where pandoc and a print.css file should be useful. If worst comes to worst I can always paste something into LibreOffice and just change the styling that way. Another thing I’ll have to change is how I search for things but since I do have access to the terminal I can always resort to grep if worst comes to worst.

Extras

I did have a few things that led me to try and avoid using web interfaces for this

  • The Website Obesity Crisis. Comments on reddit and Hacker News
  • The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
  • I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
  • Browser bloat has been a problem for a long, long time now.
  • The proliferation of browser-based text editors (StackEdit, Dillinger, Editor.md, WordPress) that try to do too much and they end up falling flat on their face cos nothing beats the responsiveness of editing locally.
  • The flipside of the above is I can use editors native to each platform. This post was typed on vim, then pasted into WP, for example. This makes for a much, much nicer editing experience specially when doing long-form text or to-do lists.
  • Avoiding lock-in. It was a drag to move from one platform to another and paste everything manually, cos all of these tools depend on locking you in.
  • Security. My Nextcloud instance is exposed to the Internet but I can always implement more things cos I control the network, the hardware, and the operating system.
  • Other people who were also on search of a good editing experience, like this, or this.
  • Easy migration of mark-up. I’m trying to use editors that support CommonMark since that way I can always be more or less sure of how something is going to look if I export it elsewhere, and I have the freedom of switching to something else like ReStructured Text or AsciiDoc, which I have considered.

I’m super excited about this. My notes en’t locked in anywhere and they’re all in plain-text, which is the only thing guaranteed to not change in the next 20 years,

Another attempt at a note-taking workflow Read More »