I’ve developed a new random software testing technique that I believe will become a staple of my software testing going forward. It is both helpful for agentic AI (LLM) software development, where robust software verification is more important than ever, and implemented with the help of LLMs. More…
Have you ever noticed that default key bindings are just bad? Look at Windows and CUA and control-p being print, still, to this day when printers are mostly irrelevant. For the vi text editor, it made sense for Bill Joy to fill out the keyboard with operations that he had written or could easily write in his available time, to put them conveniently in reach. But haven’t we grown beyond that…
Since I published Composiphrase , I thought I would give a list of some other interesting Emacs features or packages that are unrelated to Composiphrase, but that one might want to use with it. The list is not exhaustive, you should also do a web search of favorite Emacs packages. But it’s a good place to start, especially if you like composiphrase and want to try it more seriously.…
There is a UI paradigm that I love, and I’ve decided to give it a name: the Text Lens. More…
One of the best ideas in Vi and Vim, which I rightfully see praised online frequently, is the idea of a “composable text editing language”. Vi has a bunch of movements, like w for “forward word”, and some operations, like d for “delete”, and you can put them together. dw deletes forward one word. You can also add a number: 4dw deletes 4 words. Vim adds “text objects”, which are “selection” instead…
As mentioned last time, I’ve been reconsidering visual line mode. Don’t get me wrong, I love visual line mode. But vi and its descendants are very line-centric. Lines are first-class, while every other way of looking at or splitting up the text, or “text object”, is sort of second class. There are so many features of vi and vim that operate on lines specifically, that just don’t…
While I’ve shed evil-mode, I still want to use modal editing 🗽 , of course. I wanted to shed the on-character cursor positioning as discussed previously , among other things. I considered several modal editing packages in emacs, and... ok, yeah, I wrote my own. I feel like I need to justify this. More…
The biggest mistake of vi-style editors is that it positions the cursor on characters instead of between characters. More…