Helix and Marksman LSP server

The Marksman LSP server experience with Helix is so smooth. Given a directory of Markdown files, dropping in a blank .marksman.toml or running git init . puts the directory on Marksman’s radar as a thing to work with. Provided Marksman is in your path, there’s no need for additional config.

Drop into insert mode, start typing wikilink brackets ([[) and it invokes autocomplete on every file in the directory.

Placing the cursor over a wikilink, you can use gd (go to definition) to open that file in a new buffer.

In other Helix progress notes, I briefly had a bunch of vim keybindings set up to quit stumbling over the evil muscle memory I picked up from Doom Emacs. Over the weekend, sitting in a hotel room waiting for a concert to start, I decided I wasn’t so proficient at vim that I should cling to it, so I got rid of them.

That is definitely making for a few mistakes here and there, but Helix isn’t that hard to pick up.

Other Helix stuff I picked up:

You can hack in Markdown auto-increment for unordered lists and tasks by saying they’re comments in your languages.toml file:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
comment-tokens = ["-", "+", "*", "1.", ">", "- [ ]"]

… and this lets me check off Markdown tasks with spc x:

[keys.normal."space"]
x = [
  "extend_to_line_start",
  "flip_selections",
  "extend_to_line_end",
  "extend_line",
  """:pipe awk '{
    if ($0 ~ /^- \\[ \\]/) {
      sub(/^- \\[ \\]/, "- [x]"); print;
    } else if ($0 ~ /^- \\[x\\]/) {
      sub(/^- \\[x\\]/, "- [ ]"); print;
    } else if ($0 ~ /^- /) {
      sub(/^- /, "- [ ] "); print;
    } else {
      print "- [ ] " $0;
    }
  }'""",
  "goto_first_nonwhitespace",
  "collapse_selection",
  "move_line_down"
]

When I kick off the day with a daily note I like to check whatever I’m using for tasks to figure out the most pressing stuff, and it goes into a checklist where it’s not an official todo, just a priority I’ll keep seeing as I go in and out of the daily note to log stuff during the day.

It is a little disorienting to have a full-featured editor that launches so quickly without worrying about daemonizing it. I mean, micro is pretty full-featured and has some nice plugins, but at some point evil-mode won me over to modal editing and micro doesn’t do that. It’s got a remarkably flexible keymapping system, but not so flexible that you can go modal with it.