Rare self-promotion of a blog post because the topic has been haunting me for years: https://f5n.org/blog/2026/shell-scripts/

I find it pretty hilarious that Microsoft's RDP app for macOS (called "Windows App") is better than the native Windows 11 RDP client. Except for the name, of course.

What happens if you don't read the manual properly?

So I've been using TextAdept as sort of "not as an IDE/Code Editor per se, but a good Text Editor that can also do code" for years (because it's excellent) but I've always been missing VS Code's "Open folder".

So of course I started looking into implementing that but I really couldn't be bothered to dig into the C/C++ code and maybe keep my own fork.

But there's a `~/.textadept/init.lua` and I knew could do a few nice things with its Lua API.

So what I ended up having working:

Run `fd $(dirname current_buffer) | rofi -dmenu -sort -sorting-method fzf && open that file`, but partially in Lua.

But then I discovered "Projects" and also "Quick Open" which kinda does the same, so I now just have a couple lines of code for a function that does `dirname(current buffer's file), provide that editable in a popup dialog (so I can go up), and on submit opens the Quick Open (which has fuzzy search) with that dir as an argument.

And then a shell script to wrap my `fd $1 | rofi ... | xargs textadept` thing for out-of-editor use.

And 90% of it was in the manual. Doh.

#textadept #editors #nih

I've not had problems with audio on Linux for 10 or 15 years but now I have some sort of Rube Goldberg setup (for stupid reasons?) and I just need to write it up as a blog post /facepalm

Updated IntelliJ and the IdeaVIM plugin didn't work. Noticed I am completely useless with normal editors until the shock recedes.

I wrote about using an old NUC with Linux as my personal dev environment in October and after doing #AdventOfCode I can't stress how happy this solution has made me.
An always-on scoped environment where I could even quickly remote into in a lunch break from a different machine. Second best thing to being on Linux full time, I guess.

Used a bit of #gleam for the first time for #adventofcode - and I have mixed feelings.
It's kinda neat, a few things are annoying, but I can't put my finger on it. It works very well, that's not it - people have apparently been arguing that it's not really like Elixir, but I see so many similarities which superfluously are not stemming from the BEAM. Maybe I just need to stick with it a little longer. Also maybe it's somehow just solid but not exciting? Guess I need to write a web app.