Blog on g.p. anders

What's New in Neovim 0.11

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Neovim 0.11 was just released. As in previous installments in this series, let’s talk a bit about some of the big highlights! As always, the full list of changes can be found in the release notes (use :h news to read inside of Neovim).

Breaking Changes

We make a concerted effort to avoid breaking changes. We want the upgrade path between versions to be smooth and simple, but occasionally breaking changes are necessary (often times, a breaking change is a bug fix, or there is no way to introduce a transition path between old and new behavior). The full list of breaking changes can be found in the release notes (:h news-breaking). Plugin authors are especially encouraged to carefully read this section, as many of the changes have to do with “lower level” APIs.

Ghostty Is Native—So What?

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ghostty is a new terminal emulator by Mitchell Hashimoto. While a lot has been said about Ghostty’s performance, less discussed is its native platform¹ integration which is, in my opinion, its most distinctive and underrated feature.

Despite being listed as a key motivating factor in Mitchell’s original introduction, online discussions about Ghostty rarely mention its native integration, and when they do many commenters remain skeptical over its importance or don’t understand what that means. So I want to briefly describe some of the ways that Ghostty takes advantage of native OS integration so you can see for yourself what makes it stand out.

What's New in Neovim 0.10

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Neovim 0.10 was the longest release cycle since the heady days of the 0.5 release. There are a ton of new features in this release (as well as some breaking changes), so be sure to check the full release notes. You can view the release notes directly in Nvim with :h news. The news file includes information on new features, deprecations, and breaking changes. I especially urge plugin authors to read this file carefully.

Making ijq Fast

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:14:07 -0500

I recently received an issue report that ijq was performing slowly. The issue claimed that, when used on a large (16 MB) JSON file, ijq was “too slow to be usable”. I downloaded the test file which was (helpfully) provided in the issue and tried it myself. Even using the most charitable definition, I agree that this classifies as “unusably slow”. Note that in this screen recording I am displaying my key presses to show just how unresponsive ijq is:

State of the Terminal

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a companion article to my talk at Neovimconf 2023.

I have been using Vim/Neovim as my full time text editor for close to 10 years. I’ve spent a lot of time in the terminal and have become very aware of the many flaws and idiosyncrasies of this bizarre platform. But I also think it gets a lot of things right! And I’m not alone in this belief: terminal based tools are still widely popular even in the presence of many alternatives (the StackOverflow developer survey shows that Neovim is the “most loved” editor 3 years in a row).

What's New in Neovim 0.7

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 07:14:00 -0600

Neovim 0.7 was just released, bringing with it lots of new features (and of course plenty of bug fixes). You can find the full release notes here, but in this post I’ll cover just a few of the new additions.

Lua everywhere!

Neovim 0.5 saw the introduction of Lua as a first-class citizen in the Neovim ecosystem: Lua could now be used in the user’s init file, plugins, colorschemes, ftplugins, etc. Basically, anywhere that you could use a .vim file, you could now use .lua instead.

Exploring Mach-O, Part 4

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:13:53 -0700

This is part 4 of a 4 part series exploring the structure of the Mach-O file format. Here are links to part 1, part 2, and part 3.

When we started this series we didn’t know anything about Mach-O other than some vague idea that it’s a binary file format used by macOS. By now, we have a much better understanding of how Mach-O is laid out and how the operating system uses the information in a Mach-O file to run a program.

Exploring Mach-O, Part 3

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:13:51 -0700

This is part 3 of a 4 part series exploring the structure of the Mach-O file format. Here are links to part 1, part 2, and part 4.

We left off with a basic parser that is able to parse the Mach-O header from our file. Now that the bones of our parser are fleshed out, it should be fairly straightforward to parse the rest of the file.

Load commands

Let’s take a look at our header again:

Exploring Mach-O, Part 2

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:13:50 -0700

This is part 2 of a 4 part series exploring the structure of the Mach-O file format. Here are links to part 1, part 3, and part 4.

Last time, we created our own tiny Mach-O executable. This program doesn’t do anything useful, it’s simply the smallest executable we can use to examine what the Mach-O file format looks like.

From here on, we’ll write our own primitive parser to examine the contents of our program. I’m going to write my Mach-O parser in Zig. Why Zig? Mostly because I really like it and I find it’s quite easy to get simple things like this up and running. It’s also particularly well suited to tasks like this¹.

Exploring Mach-O, Part 1

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:13:49 -0700

This is part 1 of a 4 part series exploring the structure of the Mach-O file format. Here are links to part 2, part 3, and part 4.

I recently read a great article from Amos over at fasterthanli.me that explored the ELF format for Linux executables. Digging into these kinds of topics in a deep and thorough way has always been super interesting to me, not to mention educational. So, I thought I’d take a stab at doing something similar for Mach-O, the object file format used by macOS.

The definitive guide to using tmux-256color on macOS

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: macOS 14 (Sonoma) updated its bundled ncurses version to 6.0. This version ships with a tmux-256color entry by default, so the workaround below is no longer needed.

macOS ships with an old and very out-of-date version of ncurses (5.7). This version does not contain a terminfo entry for tmux-256color, the preferred TERM value when using tmux.

If you installed tmux via Homebrew or MacPorts, then you will also have a newer version of ncurses (6.X) present on your system installed by your package manager. This is the version of ncurses that tmux itself was built against, which is why you can use

The Zettelkasten

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Mon, 25 May 2020 15:43:50 -0600

I have always been a bit of a nerd about note taking and knowledge management systems. I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done with relish, and I’ve obsessively experimented with every iteration of note taking apps and tools mankind has created. Trello, Todolist, Evernote, Bullet Journal, you name it.

I think my obsession in this area is mostly driven by the combination of my love of useless trivia and my immense capacity for forgetfulness, a perfect recipe if ever there was one for developing the habit of writing things down.

Introducing ijq, an Interactive jq Tool

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sat, 23 May 2020 19:07:09 -0600

If you’re unfamiliar with the tool jq, it describes itself as the “sed for JSON”. It’s a powerful command line tool that lets you do complex parsing and manipulation of JSON documents and is extremely useful for testing APIs or analysing JSON datasets.

One challenge with jq, however, is finding just the right filter. The query language that jq uses is not always obvious, so typically you’ll spend a bit of time getting it just right to select the data you need.

Managing Dotfiles With Git

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Managing so-called “dotfiles” (config files starting with a . in your home directory) in git is a fairly common practice. There are many write-ups on this topic already, but I wanted to share my own workflow as well as some potentially useful tips and tricks.

Building Site Search With Hugo

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 13:08:49 -0600

Search is a handy feature you might want on your Hugo static site. Hugo does not have any built-in way to provide a search function, but they do offer some suggestions on how to do it yourself.

The difficulty with implementing a search function is that it usually requires some kind of server side logic, which is obviously missing when using a static site like Hugo. So any search implementation must be done entirely on the client side. One of the options Hugo suggests offers an implementation using jQuery and Fuse.js.

Books for Beginner Economists

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am not an economist by any definition of the word: I haven’t taken a formal economics class since high school. But in the last few years I’ve read a few books that have introduced me to the wonderful, fascinating world of economics, which I now consider one of my favorite subjects.

Two books that provide a good grasp on foundational economics are Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan and Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. Both books offer a “qualitative” introduction to economic concepts: no equations, formulas, or scary math. Both answer fundamental questions about human behavior using tools of economics and provide a framework for answering other questions using economics.

Creating Your Own Git Server

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ever considered setting up and running your very own git server? It’s actually quite easy! In this post, I’ll outline the steps I took to set up my own so that you can give it a try yourself. But first, why might you even want to go through the trouble of setting up your own server?

Caching LDAP Queries in Mutt

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

You can use the lbdb tool to query an LDAP server within Mutt using the query_command setting. Setting up lbdb is out of scope for this article, although you can find plenty of documentation and examples online (here and here, for instance). One drawback to this approach, however, is that everytime you want to look up a recipient in Mutt you have to query your LDAP server, which can be quite slow.

Git Plumbing

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Porcelain and Plumbing

git commit

Plain English: Create a new tree object from the current index and create a new commit object from that tree. The commit object combines a commit message, parent, date, author, committer, and the tree. Update the ref pointed to by HEAD with the hash of the new commit object.

Plumbing

Once files are in the index (using git add or git update-index) use git write-tree to create a new tree object:

You Don't Want a Tax Refund

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tax time is approaching and this year, like every year, it is common to hear people excited about receiving their tax return discussing the exciting purchases they plan on making with this perceived windfall.

I want to challenge this conventional wisdom by stating a true but unpopular fact: getting a tax return is not necessarily a good thing and, in most cases, is actually the least desirable financial outcome one can achieve.

Using Xilinx Vitis for Embedded Hardware Acceleration

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Xilinx recently released their new Vitis tool, which aims to ease the process of accelerating high-level algorithms in applications in an FPGA. It is an ambitious tool with a lot of potential. This guide will help you get started.

Archive the Internet

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the Internet continues to grow and age, we are seeing more and more of a phenomenon called “link rot”. Link rot is the all-too-familiar experience of returning to a bookmark or link only to find that it’s no longer maintained, been taken down, or even changed to something else. What can we do about this?

2019 Reading Review

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019, I read 27 books. This was less than last year’s 40 and is not an overly impressive quantity for any serious reader, yet I’m happy with both the amount and the content that I read this year. Below, I’ll give a brief summary of my favorites.

Evaluating Markdown Code Blocks in Vim

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When writing Markdown it is common to have code blocks within your document that look something like this:

This is a code block:
```bash
echo "Hello, world!"
```

One of the great features of Emacs’ Org mode is its ability to evaluate blocks of code from within the editing environment. I always appreciated this feature about Org mode which got me to thinking about implementing something similar in Vim.

Write Your Own Man Pages

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post was inspired by the tool um. I decided to try my hand at making my own lightweight implementation using just a shell function. I decided to name my tool ual as a nod to the fact that it complements man.

Tutorial: Booting Linux on the ZCU102

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post contains a step-by-step walk through on booting Linux on Xilinx’s ZCU102 MPSoC evaluation board.

The Birthday Problem

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The “Birthday Problem” is a classic in introductory probability theory, and it never fails to impress the newly initiated. The problem goes like this:

How many people do you need to have in one room for the probability that at least 2 people in that room share a birthday to be 50%?

The answer may surprise you. Before we get to the answer though, let’s go real briefly into the math behind it.

Make Your Mac Clean Itself

contact@gpanders.com (Gregory Anders) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Update (6/18/2019): Since writing this post I have released a tool called pushbroom that should make all of this easier and a bit more robust.