Getting the vim key bindings to work for focus switching in this modal dialog took me forever. Only cursors and (Shift+)Tab are supported out of the box. I absolutely understand that, it’s fine. I installed an input handler on the dialog, but the focus always stayed the same.

After two wasted hours, I was in despair to copy the tview.Modal into my own code base. Of course, I had to fix all the private tview field accesses first. But even installing the input handler directly on the buttons themselves did not work. Even though, the handler was definitely executed, the focus did not shift. Forcing redraws as a last resort also did not work.

Looking through all the messy chained input handling, I eventually stumbled across another place in the tview.Form, which is internally used by tview.Modal. This messed around with app focus receptions and input handlers. This gave me the idea to make the tview.Application refocus my modal dialog after I told the modal dialog which button to select. And would you look at that, this did the trick! I haven’t completely figured out what is going on exactly, but I could get rid of my Modal clone again.

I always go through hell with focus handling in tview. Each and every time. It just does not feel natural to me. Complete brainfuck to wrap my head around. The Urwid API felt sooo much more refined, it never was an issue. It just works. In fact, I cannot think of any other TUI library that has remotely the same pain level when it comes to focusing widgets as tview.

Now I’m curious how movwin deals with that. ;-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: “Naah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.” 😅 And indeed … ha.

Oh god, yeah, that’s a lot of <span>. 🤔 Can’t really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

In parts. I write everything in Markdown (it’s online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like “re-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html file” and that’s mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

@tftp@tilde.town mentioning in here requires he whole shebang. With jenny, if using vim, there is a key combination:

Nick name completions: Allows you to use ^X ^U to turn verbatim nick names into full twtxt mentions. For example, typing “cath” and then pressing ^X ^U will turn “cath” into a full mention, like “@”. (This function will read the contents of your “~/.config/jenny/follow” file.)

See: https://movq.de/git/jenny/file/vim/README.html

Via https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3220#issuecomment-4198066671 I came across this nice selection on why not to use AI: https://github.com/Vxrpenter/AIMania/blob/main/WHY.md#why

This then lead me to the slopware list: https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

Holy shit, there’s even more than I thought. :-O In addition to Vim, the following affects me more or less daily (but hopefully not my ancient versions): curl, VLC, ImageMagick, rsync, Python, systemd and even the Linux Kernel itself. Oh fuck me dead. :‘-(

@movq@www.uninformativ.de that’s it, fork it!. I am forking vim. :-D

And another fork: https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.html

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Luckily, I’ve never encountered any bugs in Vim with my type of work and features I use.

H… Ho… How have I not heard about vim-tagbar before? 😳

https://github.com/preservim/tagbar

Godbolt’s Compiler Explorer support for Vim-like editing is amazing. Sometimes I almost forget that I’m using a website.

All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

En cas d’oubli de sudo dans vim :w !sudo tee %

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice! :-) Since vim is quite advanced cavemanery, you could probably even remap Enter when editing the twtxt.txt.

Just typing twts directly into my twtxt file.

Details:

• Opening my twtxt file remotely using vim scp://user@remote:port//path/to/twtxt.txt
  
• Inserting the date, time and tab part of the twt with :.!echo "$(date -Is)\t"
  
• In case I need to add a new line I just Ctrl+Shift+u, type in the 2028 and hit Enter
  
• In order to replay, you just steal a twt hash from your favorite Yarn instance.
  

It looks tedious, but it’s fun to know I can twt no matter where I am, as long as can ssh in.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de streamlining jenny.vim?

index adc0db9..cb54abc 100644
--- a/vim/ftdetect/jenny.vim
+++ b/vim/ftdetect/jenny.vim
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 au BufNewFile,BufRead jenny-posting.eml setl completefunc=jenny#CompleteMentions fo-=t wrap
+au BufRead,BufNewFile jenny-posting.eml normal $

Sin terminar de adaptarme al teclado Dvorak ya me siento tentado por el Colemak. Antes, al menos, tengo que fluir mejor en VIm.

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

#vim pour incrémenter un nombre (numéro de section) ctrl-a

I probably should implement some editing feature in tt. Sure, I can easily edit my feed in vim to fix typos. But then I still have to manually remove the old message from the cache so that the new message is inserted on next reload and I don’t end up with “duplicates” in the message tree.

A Vim-like interface for Firefox https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ctrl-U in Vim does something similar (“Delete all entered characters before the cursor in the current line”), but it does not put them into the “clipboard”. I sometimes hit Ctrl-U by accident and then my text is gone. 😡😂

Generating Slides in Vim - https://jarbus.net/blog/generating-slides-in-vim/

vim + ollama #vim #ollama

@prologic@twtxt.net Phew, I’m indeed not twtxt.dev, because I sometimes actually do edit my feed with vim like a barbarian.

Show HN: Zxc – Rust TLS proxy with tmux and Vim as UI, BurpSuite alternative
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Is there a way to auto-insert a time stamp on vi or vim at the beginning of each line? Like, upon opening like so:

2025-03-20 15:04:03 Blah blah blah blah
2025-03-20 15:04:15 Bleh bleh bleh bleh
2025-03-20 15:04:22 ...

A Vim Guide for Advanced Users https://thevaluable.dev/vim-advanced/

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Neat, I got the principle, so mission accomplished. :-)

I have configured my vim to use a tab width of four. So, I noticed that especially https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/reachability_with_stack.cc (but also partially the other C++ file) mixes tabs and spaces for indentation. :-)

I’m refactoring (mangling four lines of of code with assignments into one function call) and man, do I love vim macros! Such a bloody amazing invention. Saves me heaps of manual labor.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Well, congrats, I guess! :-D I never had Vim crash on me, they do a killer job on keeping it stable.

And that was the first time Vim ever crashed on me:

Vim: Caught deadly signal SEGV
Vim: preserving files...
Vim: Finished.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I was using Ctrl+P to scroll through the completion list. 🤔 Reproducible. Ctrl+N still works.

Hopefully fixed by this: https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8d0bb6dc9f2e5d94ebb59671d592c1b7fa325ca6

@prologic@twtxt.net it offends someone with a different opinion? 🤣

No, seriously… :diffoff is used to disable vim’s diff mode that’s usually started running vim -d someFile someOtherFile or by having both files on a split window and applying :diffthis on both panes. (just learned this this morning)

ROFL 🤣 I’ve found myself a new insult: :diffoff a vim command…

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nah, that’s definitely my sleep deprivation … I should stop effing with vim when I’m sleepy 😅

a new emmanation of my trusty old vim config, now available as a home-manager nix module. now i can track my dependencies with nix instead of using git subtree and it makes installing backend programs like language servers and such way easier. https://src.ix.cyb.red/pe-vim/

I think it’s time I set up jenny for this feed… been echo-ing my twits manually and there came times when it made me feel like a dork xD Plus I don’t have my vim’s :set spell to catch up with the typos

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah, that’s the thing! I’ve been trying to learn more vim motions and I just can’t get myself to remember any… Now I have that cheat sheet bookmarked, I can look them up on the need to know basis.

Learned to gg=G and to va", ci", di{… in vim the other day 😆 Life will never be the same, I can feel it. ref

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org welcome! :-) I am doing my best to get more acquaintance with vi/vim. I think nano has spoiled me too much. LOL.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hmm, I guess I could do that too. I have startinsert set on my .vimrc, so I will either have to take it out, or exit insert, $, then insert again. I think the way you do it would be the way to go.

I tried setting VISUAL to be something like vim -c 'star!', which does the same thing, but no dice. :-/

Today, I learned about vim "+normal $", how cool! :-) Thanks @quark@ferengi.one!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, maybe you can help me with this. I want to place the vim cursor at the end of the first line on replies, and forks. I have tried adding to this to jenny’s configuration:

"editor": "vim \"+normal $\"",

But that doesn’t work. How would you go about it?

This is a test twt to see if :set formatoptions-=t in vim would stop the annoying line breaking I’ve been having in my twts… And I guess, that’s it! Things are looking OK on my end.

How about if I add in a separate paragraph like this one? Did hit return twice for it. I hope it isn’t breaking anything else.

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah I’ve been having this problem for quite sometime now. It boils down to Vi/Vim/NeoVim inserting those line breaks automatically when editing an .eml file (if I can remember the file extension correctly) … I think Jenny makes use of those. I had to delete them manually until I was told that the problem was fixed after I added the charset utf-8; to my nginx config file. I’ll try and fix this next…

I might have found the actual source of my problem.

Jenny uses an .eml file when composing a twt …
and vim kinda auto formats it and inserts in those line breaks every ~70 character.

Then, I stumbled upon this link where Where someone reports that saving a .eml into a .txt might… corrupt the data?

@bender@twtxt.net I’m using both machines in English.

Checked my locale and it spits out:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_NUMERIC=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_TIME=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_COLLATE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MONETARY=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MESSAGES=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_PAPER=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_NAME=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_ADDRESS=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_TELEPHONE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MEASUREMENT=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_IDENTIFICATION=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_ALL=

🤷🏽 … and that only happens when vi, vim or nvim are launched by Jenny to compose a twt.

yep, it did! And it’s definitely something with vim.

Thanks again @movq@www.uninformativ.de !! I have figured things out and set up Jenny and Vim completion following your blog post! Cheers!

https://github.com/erikw/vim-keybindings-everywhere-the-ultimate-list je pose ça là… #vi