a small squirrel came up to my office door--which is the door to our
back yard--yesterday morning and looked in the through the screen and
just kind of idled there for a little bit.
Then the power went out for a couple hours. My laptop had a full
charge, so I grabbed my cell phone to tether some internet, and went
and sat outside under the oak tree and a squirrel--I like to imagine
it was the same one--chattered and barked at me the whole time.
Social little guy. Made me wonder whether the previous owner fed the
squirrels or something.
## nano ##
Had a small Text Editor Wars convo on #tildetown yesterday. I had
just discovered that my new pinebook pro shipped without vi/vim or
emacs, and seemed to only have nano as a text editor. (I didn't think
to check if it had something like joe, which I only know about
because of town.)
So I had just made the bold claim that nano is a garbage text editor,
no better than notepad.exe, which is something that I have believed
for a long time. Several townies jumped in to say that they use nano,
and even use nano exclusively under certain situations.
~twee pointed out that nano can record and play back macros, which is
something I never knew before. That is an advanced editor feature,
and ~twee successfully changed a long held belief of mine. I no
longer think that nano is a worthless text editor on par with
notepad.exe.
I now think that it is a decent, feature-light kind of editor for
people who don't want to bother learning vim or if the don't like
modal editing, or if they don't want to bother with emacs.
## justified text in vim ##
vim tricks: I have long admired how people on gopher make beautifully
aligned and formatted text, and I couldn't really find a good way to
create that effect myself. ~cat famously formats theirs all by hand!
I finally came across a couple recommendations for `par` and it ended
up being just the thing! You can pipe text through it with, e.g.,
`par -w69j` to justify paragraphs and it turns out super great!
Then you can have vim use par to format paragraphs by adding this
line to your vimrc:
```
set formatprg=par\ -w69j
```
Then you can use the `gq` command to format your paragraphs in vim
like a dream!
