File Managers

In 2023-12, I got a nag email from Jam Software, passive-aggressively letting me know that I was using TreeSize on more machines than I was licensed for. Perhaps they meant my old laptop, from which I can’t delicense because said computer is an unbootable mess of corrupted data. But honestly, it’s hard to say what they meant; the email was as self-contradictory as it was condescending. TreeSize is great software, but a practice like this makes Jam a company I can’t recommend, and I’ve removed the links to their site accordingly.
Microsoft’s File (or Windows) Explorer1 has never been good2. Early Windows felt like a GUI for the sake of a GUI, competition to the Macintosh. The Mac’s Finder was itself quite simple, and also never really quite grew into anything for power users. This makes sense for Apple, but Microsoft started off with a weak simulacrum of Finder and never really got around to embracing its power users. Before Windows was ever released, Peter Norton was selling an incredibly powerful file manager for DOS, Norton Commander3.

Kakoune

I’m not writing this post in vim, which is really a rather odd concept for me. I’ve written quite a bit about vim in the past; it has been my most faithful writing companion for many years now. Part of the reason is its portability and POSIX inclusion – it (or its predecessor, vi) is likely already on a given system I’m using, and if it isn’t, I can get it there easily enough. But just as important is the fact that it’s a modal editor, where text manipulation is handled via its own grammar and not a collection of finger-twisting chords. There aren’t really many other modal editors out there, likely because of that first point – if you’re going to put the effort into learning such a thing, you may as well learn the one that’s on every system (and the one with thousands of user-created scripts, and the one where essentially any question imaginable is just a Google away…). So, I was a bit surprised when I learned about Kakoune, a modal editor that simply isn’t vim1.

Now, I’ve actually written a couple of recent posts in Kakoune so that I could get a decent feel for it, but I have no intention of leaving vim. I don’t know that I would recommend people learn it over vim, for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. Though if those things were inconsequential to a potential user, Kakoune has some very interesting design ideas that I think would be more approachable to a new user. Heck, it even has a Clippy:

~                                                          ╭──╮   ╭───┤nop├────╮
~                                                          │  │   │ do nothing │
~                                                          @  @  ╭╰────────────╯
~                                                          ││ ││ │
~                                                          ││ ││ ╯
~                                                          │╰─╯│
~                                                          ╰───╯
nop          unset-option                                                      █
:nop            content/post/2018-06/kakoune.md 17:1 [+] prompt - client0@[2968]

Here are a few of my takeaways:

I guess there are far more negative points in that list than positives, but the truth is that the positives are really positive. Kakoune has done an incredible job of changing vim paradigms in ways that actually make a lot of sense. It’s a more modern, accessible, streamlined approach to modal editing. Streamlining even justifies several of my complaints – certainly the lack of a file browser, and probably the lack of splitting fall squarely under the Unix philosophy of Do One Thing and Do It Well. I’m going to continue to try to grok Kakoune a bit better, because even in my vim-centric world, I can envision situations where the more direct (yet still modal) interaction model of Kakoune would be incredibly beneficial to my efficiency.


netrw and invalid certificates

Don’t trust invalid certificates. Only do this sort of workaround if you really know what you’re dealing with is okay.

Sometimes I just need to reference the source of an HTML or CSS file online without writing to it. If I need to do this while I’m editing something else in vim, my best course of action is to open a split in vim and do it there. Even if I’m not working on said thing in vim, that is the way that I’m most comfortable moving around in documents, so there’s still a good chance I want to open my source file there.

netrw, the default1 file explorer for vim, handles HTTP and HTTPS. By default, it does this using whichever of the following it finds first: elinks, links, curl, wget, or fetch. At work, we’re going through an HTTPS transition, and at least for the time being, the certificates are… not quite right. Not sure what the discrepancy is (it’s not my problem), but strict clients are wary. This includes curl and wget. When I went to view files via HTTPS in vim, I was presented with errors. This obviously wasn’t vim’s fault, but it took a bit of doing to figure out exactly how these elements interacted and how to modify the behavior of what is (at least originally) perceived as netrw.

When netrw opens up a remote connection, it essentially just opens up a temporary file, and runs a command that uses that temporary file as input or output depending on whether the command is a read or write operation. As previously mentioned, netrw looks for elinks, links, curl, wget, and fetch. My cygwin install has curl and wget, but none of the others. It also has lynx, which I’ll briefly discuss at the end. I don’t know if elinks or links can be set to ignore certificate issues, but I don’t believe so. curl and wget can, however.

We set this up in vim by modifying netrw_HTTP_cmd, keeping in mind that netrw is going to spit out a temporary file name to read in. So we can’t output to STDOUT, we need to end with a file destination. For curl, we can very simply use :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="curl -k". For wget, we need to specify output, tell it not to verify certs, and otherwise run quietly: :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="wget --no-check-certificate -q -O".

I don’t have an environment handy with links or elinks, but glancing over the manpages leads me to believe this isn’t an option with either. It isn’t with lynx either, but in playing with it, I still think this is useful: for a system with lynx but not any of the default HTTP(s) handlers, netrw can use lynx via :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="lynx -source >". Also interesting is that lynx (and presumably links and elinks via different flags) can be used to pull parsed content into vim: :let g:netrw_HTTP_cmd="lynx -dump >".


ep

This is an old post from an old blog; assets may be missing, links may be broken, and my opinions may differ considerably by this point…

I spend a good deal of time inside a terminal. Text-based apps are powerful, when you know what you're doing, and fast (also when you know what you're doing, I suppose). If an equivalent Cocoa or X11 GUI tool offers me little advantage, I'm probably going to stick to either a CLI- or TUI-based piece of software. One of the more important, taken-for-granted pieces of the command line environment is that of the pager. Typically, one would use something like more or less for their pager. For a while, I used w3m as my pager, as well as my text-based web browser. Then Snow Leopard came out, and everything from MacPorts got totally jacked up and left much of my system jacked up as well. Parts of it I've fixed, other parts I've been lazy about. For that reason, or perhaps not, I have transitioned to ELinks as my text-based web browser. Today, after recent discussions with a friend regarding w3m and ELinks, I had a thought - why not use ELinks as my pager as well?