Helix IDE unlocks my long-dreamt-of command-line workflow

I’m still enjoying my Helix experience, as it enables a workflow that I think is quite cool. With my dev-on-server setup, I can’t believe how effective I can be even when using Termux on my phone, paired with my ssh-into-tmux-script.

This is what it looks like doing actual (expo) mobile development with Helix IDE from my mobile (via the termux app) while sitting in Oliver Sandwich:

But, I digress… Back to ‘Working on Tags’

While working on my expo app, I began to miss how WebStorm would automatically add closing tags, and update tag pairs as I renamed one of them, etc.

I’ve learnt a few methods to work with tags, which, for now, seem quite adequate.

I’ve noticed a ‘path _ does not exist’ quirk when copying the flake.nix file from one project to another

I thought that I could replicate the nix-flake defined environment of one folder(project) by copying flake.nix and .envrc into a new folder. When I do that, I’m asked to run direnv allow on the new folder, but under a particular circumstance, something weird happens; you’ll get an error like this:

direnv: loading ~/proj/project-name/.envrc
direnv: using flake .
error: path '/nix/store/0cc..nm8-source/flake.nix' does not exist

I like the idea of SSH’ing into a tmux session when doing work on a remote machine so that I can reconnect right where I left off.

However, I don’t like it when the internet connection is unstable, and you must reconnect whenever you drop off. Or, when I close my laptop for a couple of hours and open it back up to a crashed terminal emulator. I tried using mosh as I’ve done with IRC before, but I didn’t like how the terminal scrolling & copy/paste behaviour was affected unintuitively by mosh & tmux.

First, make it more like Vim

My frst step for any IDE setup is to make it more like Vim using whichever extension/plugin they have to offer :)

(you can even do this with browser text fields via wasavi)

So, for VSCode I used the main vim plugin,

and then added the following keybindings.json and settings.json which are found at ~/.config/Code/User/ …

The Quest Continues

In 2012, I started blogging about Vim As My Ide. At that time, I was also going to try and focus on Scala as it was all the rage. However, I didn’t like using clunky IDEs like Eclipse to develop in the Java world, and I didn’t have any pressing reason to continue. Today, I’m back on board the Scala train for work purposes and will leverage some of the newfound support for Scala that Vim has.