vimpc

I found a page listing applications that use the vim interface and discovered a better mpd client.

Since my fingers became fluent in vim I find other user interfaces irritating. Fortunately other people feel the same way and there are a good selection of apps that let me interact with my computer using just the home keys on the keyboard.

• mutt - email client
• vim - text editing
• tmux - terminal multiplexing
• feh - image viewer
• vifm - file manager
• qpdf - pdf viewer
• browser - firefox with vim vixen
• media player - was ncmpcpp (now vimpc)

I've been mostly happy with this setup but my media player was frustrating. I used pms until I discovered it was breaking my tmux status bar and moved to ncmpcpp. Apart from a name that's impossible to remember, it refused to ignore tags. It also had a complicated list of tabs, wouldn't jump to the currently playing song in the playlist, and when you use '/' to do a search it would jump to the file but pressing 'n' would move the file down in the playlist (wtf?). Looking for a file I couldn't quite remember meant it would fixate on the wrong file and then refuse to 'find next'. It had a curses based find-file dialog that was slower to use and more complicated than I needed but it still preferred tags over the file name (am I the only one without pristine mp3 tags?!) and I usually had to resort to cd'ing into my mp3 directory to run a 'find'. Finally I couldn't configure tmux to start it automatically on boot like every one of my other utilities because it would segfault, I think, because the window wasn't the right size.

vimpc solves all these issues. It can be configured to show me just the filenames, it will show a playlist on boot, the search works like every other application with a search feature and it supports 'smartcase'.

The way I use computers became streamlined as I discovered utilities that run equally well locally as on a remote computer and are fast and responsive. Having everything use the same keyboard interface means I don't have to think about what I'm interacting with. The apps I use are compatible with most hardware, stable, and any updates are usually optional features rather than "here's a new way to do things" type additions. The only apps in this list I'm worried about are feh, which depends on X11 and may not work when we eventually move to wayland, and firefox, which is great but has a bad history of adding unwanted features, breaking things, and forcing ads and spyware.

posted by na on December 3, 2019 19:09