Old Computer Challenge 2024 - Day 6
I should have labeled this post as "Day 3", since, strictly speaking, this is the third formal day where I'm using the laptop that I "registered" for the challenge. But the thing is that for the past three days I really didn't turn on the laptop since I was busy with other activities. But since this is an event that lasts the entire week, I decided it would be best to follow the sequential order of the days of the challenge. So, what is the log for today?
vim, vim everywhere
I should say that when I wrote that I didn't used the laptop for the past three days that wasn't entirely correct. Last Tuesday I tried to work a little with some markdown files, so I tried to configure vim to work better with them. Why vim? Because since I started my Linux journey several years ago I was always interested in vim and all of the subculture around the Editor Wars and so on. And for my inexperienced past self, vim and Emacs where the epitome of the nerdiness and at the same time, the coolness of the computer people. Interestingly, I never managed to use it with proficiency, neither using it regularly. Later I used Windows for some years and almost forgot about vim, except for some incidental uses with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Then again, when I started using Linux again a couple years ago, I decided that this time I finally would master vim. Needless to say, I did not succeed. The reason? Laziness, mostly. I learned some commands, some keybindings, and made it my default terminal editor, but that was all.
But this time I'm adamant in learning as much as possible. Maybe not master it, but at least be more proficient with it. Thinking about that, I spent the last hours learning how to configure vim, how to add plugins and how to replicate as close as possible my VSCode setup. Right now, I'm writing this post in vim, but there's still so much to learn and I need to drill into my head the main keybindings and the ones from plugins. It's a fun experience, I must say.
RSS and other things
I did said in the last post that I uninstalled Feedly, my RSS reader of choice, because I wanted to try to read my feeds solely on the laptop. But since I didn't used the laptop for three days, what I discovered instead was that I'm not too attached to those feeds, and that if I suddenly lose my OPML file, it won't be too great a loss. I mean, I definitely like to read the blogs, news and magazines that I'm subscribed to, but I don't need to read them. At least not every day. And if I'm going to be frank, many times some of my feeds, albeit informative as they can be, are more a source of stress rather than entertainment (I'm looking at you, Hacker News). The same can be said of Mastodon and Lemmy. Fun places to check from time to time, but definitely not so important in my life. I think that I'll need to declutter that part of my life soon.
Finally, I spent some time trying to optimize the laptop. The first day I installed oblogout since I thought that I needed some sort of logout screen to properly exit my Openbox session and shutdown the laptop, but Lemurs, my display manager of choice, already fills that function, so I uninstalled oblogout. Of course, I could ditch Lemurs too and start and stop Openbox manually, but I like the idea of a login screen, even if it's a light one. The other piece of software that I uninstalled was the XFCE Power Manager, which I added to activate the keys to control the screen brightness and enable suspend. But reading the Arch Wiki I learned of backlight_control, a small app that can control the screen brightness. I setup the appropriate keybindings and presto. As for the suspend thing, I configured my logind.conf, again, following the wiki, and it worked like a charm. Yay! And I couldn't make the damn MegaCMD program to sync my files, so I installed the graphical client, still fearing about its memory consumption, but after installing and configuring, it only uses about 60MB of RAM in this machine. Not ideal, but still a lot better than what I imagined. Tomorrow, I'll test pandoc and exporting my markdown files to PDF.