This post from Julia Evans about using Helix was just the bump I needed to check it out, after installing it but never really giving it a try some time ago. I really like how quickly it’s immediately useful without much extra work or time. It will take some adjustment from vim navigation and commands, so perhaps won’t stick, but for now I’m appreciating the intentionality of thinking about what I need to do in the editor, and find so far that I’m picking it up pretty quickly.

For what it’s worth, the only additions I’ve made to Julia’s configuration so far are for some cursor differentiation and one hard-to-break vim convention:

"0" = "goto_line_start"

# from https://docs.helix-editor.com/configuration.html
[editor.cursor-shape]
insert = "bar"
normal = "block"
select = "underline"

Gosh do I feel it when Jedda says

The thing is, if I get overwhelmed sorting through photos and don’t post them in a “timely” manner, I end up never posting them. 07/17/2024

Whether it’s photos, quick posts or more lengthy things I think of writing and sharing, the overwhelm -> just-not-doing-it loop is so powerful. In my case it’s not just the sorting/editing of photos; it’s also the constant self-questioning of “is this the right thing to post?” or “is this the right place?” or “should fix the design first?” that get in my way, every time.

There is still a pretty good tape and baling wire aspect of it, but I’m pretty pleased to have put together a nicely-working revision to my photo posting, using a MacOS shortcut to upload photos to my media endpoint and output their destination URLs to a list that I can grab from in Drafts to compose and post. It was nice learning for a Saturday, too.

I had a good enough time doing some writing with an external keyboard and the iPad yesterday that I’m going to try to do it more often. Yesterday I dusted off my many-years old version of iA Writer and… it was great! What’s the state of the art for this kind of thing, these days?