Tokyo Night
Dec 10, 2022
While this blog post is titled Tokyo Night, it really is about a bunch of things. I guess I should just start from the very beginning (a very good place to start).
It all began years ago. I can't remember exactly how I ended up there, but I heard of Vim. (This statement feels a little like the computer version of "one time at band camp".) I tried to complete the tutorial but found it too complex and unintuitive — after all, we all spend so much time developing a muscle memory of normal computer operations: up, down, left, right, shift to select, control to skip words, and so on. It would be very difficult to relearn it all... and for what reason? After an evening, I closed the tutorial and moved on.
I'm giving Vim another try
I never really forgot about it though. Just like Cartesian Indices in Julia, I had the sense that, if I could only wrap my own dumb brain around it, it would be a really powerful tool. This feeling only intensified as I began to get more into programming for my work and led me to interact with these communities more deeply. Lots of developers used Vim, Emacs, or other terminal-based text editors. What did they know that I didn't? What were they getting that I wasn't? Maybe you could ungraciously just say that I had intense FOMO.
I think the final straw was how alien VSCode feels to me. I've been using it begrudgingly for the past few months (more accurately, I've been using VSCodium). While I can tell it is a powerful development environment, I just didn't like how it felt. Maybe it's because it seemed too heavyweight for my preferences. Before switching to VSCodium, I had been using much more basic editors like CotEditor or Geany. For whatever reason, I tend to like something that seems primarily like a text editor than a full-fledged application with lots of built-ins, plugins, and extra functionality. Go figure.
Recently, I got a new laptop (yeah, I know, there goes my dedication to the weird computing setup — though I think over a year and a half is a pretty respectable length of time to commit to something). Maybe the change in device has been signalling to my brain that it's also the time to make changes to my software, text editor included.
So here we are. I'm giving Vim another try. Well, more accurately, I'm trying Helix. Some names I recognise praised it in a Julia group. I don't have a deep enough knowledge to appreciate its differences from Vim or Neovim, but I'm sure they're important. To me, it has a lot of the same fundamentals: insert vs normal mode, selecting words at a time, and Vim's really weird search methods.
I'm hopeful I'll be able to get more out of this terminal-based editor this time. There are definitely some things that have changed that might help me in that sense. For one, I've been using regex regularly, so the search feels much more natural now. Now that I think about it...maybe that's the main change. But it's a big one! How often does one search???
Colour schemes
Maybe frivolously, I'm also excited to have a colour scheme that's hopefully harmonised across much more of my text experience. Previously, I had a different colour scheme for my terminal, for VSCode, for Obsidian... Though I wanted to have the same one for all of them, there just wasn't a theme I like that was available for them all. Now, though, I am happy to say that this inconsistency has been fixed by a single theme: Tokyo Night, the title of this blog post! (Yes. Even though I recognise it's a frivolous concern, it's also such an important one that I felt it was worth the title of this blog post.)
Trying to get colour schemes working in Helix led me down a rabbit hole of discovering that the macOS native terminal app doesn't do full colour; it took me a while to muck around and understand what was going on before I managed to pick a terminal app that supports full colour and was pleasant to use. (It's wezterm, incidentally.) By a happy coincidence, the theme I picked for Helix was also available for the terminal! Consistency between my text editor and terminal has been achieved at last. (I guess the last question that remains is Obsidian. I've been feeling some doubt over whether I should continue using it. Let's see.)