The Roam of Lindsay Bison

Tirade of the Tools

I am a deeply sick individual who conflates customizing a text editor over the course of a week so that it is a passable version of a program like Notepad---something that every computer has had out of the box for thirty or forty years---with creating whatever it is that I am ostensibly actually working on.

At least I am not alone in this sickness, nor is the art of writing the only one to have practitioners afflicted with this disease. Just ask the person with the $2,000 contractor grade drill who sucks those loose fence boards in impossibly tight, or the forty year old weekend warrior whose carbon-fiber road bike could moonlight on the Tour-de-France, or the aspiring novelist with the cabinet full of fountain pens and inks, about their purchases. Sometimes the fetishization of the tool is the hobby itself, and who am I to judge.

If the very notion of configuring an editor to be usable for writing prose causes circuits in your brain to start popping, take heed of the acrid smoke: this is not for you.

Back when I was a respectable member of society, I used Microsoft Word. Before that, Wordperfect and Word for Windows. This allowed me to effortlessly complete tasks like entering words into a document while having them simultaneously, automatically spell checked. But because this is not thirty years ago, I need to feel a sense of satisfaction getting spell checking to finally work in a text editor.

The spell-checking endorphin rush is not new to me. This isn't my first editor rodeo. Sublime Text was, and is, a great editor, but it provides all the functionality you could reasonably need out of the box; therefore, it is not for me, even though I paid for it. I blame my day job. You ~can't write~ shouldn't write code in Microsoft Word---that is an excellent digression for another time, but I digress.

Vim was next on the list. It wasn't flashy, but caught my eye anyway, just sitting there in the comment sections of the forums that I needed to visit. I found the answers I was looking for, but encountered questions I was not. Modal? That sounded interesting. Indeed, why would I want to be able to enter text into an editor at all times? That is a ridiculous notion. I want to develop carpal tunnel syndrome pretending to fly a spaceship while I navigate text in a file. Things normal people do on Monday at 6:00am with a coffee in one hand and a mouse in another. Difficult is smooth, and smooth is fast. Or something like that.

Eventually I had to repent at the altar of Emacs, first absolving my sins in the purgatory of Spacemacs, before being baptized in the holy chording of the constantly swapping, single threaded editor. Commands were rituals. C- and A- and S- and hundreds of ...

... okay, confession time. An original version of this rant from 2024 was about how to configure Helix to be writer-friendly, as seen below

Spell checking

This requires using vale, which is "a command-line tool that brings code-like linting to prose." This needs to be integrated into helix with vale-ls.

Once vale and its language server is installed and on your path, ~/.config/helix/lanuages.toml -> set it up for python etc., in addition to spell checking with vale

... but thankfully I stopped getting high on my own supply and acknowledged that to write something, one in fact has to write. I would scribble out a story with crayon on construction paper if someone wanted to read it.

In addition to procrastinating with software from the 70s, I have fallen into the inky pit of fountain pen usage. In school we were taught cursive and I even used it by choice up into high school. No idea why I stopped or when, kind of like trying to remember the last time you picked up your child as they wave to you pulling out of the driveway.

Collecting fountain pens seems almost entirely orthogonal to writing with them. Just look at fountain pen video reviews writing out "The quick brown fox ...," or social media posts of large cursive spreads consisting only of inspirational posts. Different hobbies.

So the current workflow is like this:

#eblo #writing