Weekly journal & Neovide

The Practicalli journal will move to a weekly cadence now I have a full time job with Griffin Bank.

I do write a daily journal for my activities in Griffin and will share information that is not sensitive or business valuable.

Engineering Manager

I've completed my first week as engineering manager and there has been a lot to learn (and still a huge amount more to learn).

I joined when we are reviewing working practices, which has given me an opportuntiy to contribute early on.

As I am learning the business and development workflows, I am adding the occasional tweek to the already excellent docs, especially for onboarding engineers. I have sneaked in a few links to the Practicalli content too :)

MacOSX Development environment

As I am setting up a Macbook Pro as the development machine I will have a chance to add any small differences between Linux and MacOSX when it comes to Clojure development.

So far the Clojure development setup is almost identical to my Linux laptops, except for the use of Homebrew to install a few tools I would normally install via Debian packages

• Kitty, a fast terminal app with multiple session tabs
• Zsh and Prezto to optomise CLI commands, with fish-style completion enabled
• Neovim & AstroNvim for editing & coding, with Clojure LSP for live linting
• Emacs for all the things I havent learned to do in Neovim, e.g. Magit rebasing
• Java 21 (homebrew)
• Clojure
• Bazel build tool (this is new to me and looks very interesting)

May of the development tools at Griffin are installed via a single script, so its quite simple to get going.

Neovide GUI for Neovim

Neovide is a very nice and really fast GUI app on top of Neovim.

I'll be using Neovide for the rest of December to see if its preferable to Neovim in a terminal (kitty).

The initial reason to use Neovide seems mainly experiential, the cursor moves smoothly along and provides a pleasing visual effect when jumping around. I am assuming this will help keep track of the cursor when navigating larger code bases and text documents. There are other cursor effects which can be configured .

Neovide install

Neovide install was via a Linux AppImage from the GitHub release page for the project.

The guifont option was set to define the font family and size specifically for Neovide

Neovide guifont setting in AstroNvim

.config/astronvim-config/options.lua

return {
  opt = {
    -- set to true or false etc.
    relativenumber = true, -- sets vim.opt.relativenumber
    number = true, -- sets vim.opt.number
    spell = false, -- sets vim.opt.spell
    signcolumn = "auto", -- sets vim.opt.signcolumn to auto
    wrap = true, -- sets vim.opt.wrap
    -- showtabline = 0,    -- sets vim.opt.showtabline - zero hides tabs
    timeoutlen = 420,
    -- neovide font
    guifont = "Fira Code:h16",
  },

Neovide specific configuration can be added using a conditional block, checking the global value vim.g.neovide

Neovide specific configuration

if vim.g.neovide then
    -- add configuration only for Neovide
end

Run neovide

A shell alias called neovide that sets AstroNvim as the configuration and runs neovide

Neovide shell alias

.config/shell-aliases

# Neovide alias with AstroNvim configuration
alias neovide="NVIM_APPNAME=astronvim neovide"

Remote server code

Neovide seems useful when working with code on a remote server, especially if the server has limited graphical support.

Neovim can be run in headless server mode using Unix sockets or TCP (ideally over an SSH connection for added security).

Neovide can connect to Neovim and display richer information, e.g. syntax warnings, ligatures, etc.

Headless command for Neovim

.local/bin/nvim-headless

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

# Start Neovim as a headless service for connection by GUI tools, e.g. Neovide

# Set AstroNvim Configuration for Neovim
export NVIM_APPNAME=astronvim

# Start Neovim listening over Unix socket
$HOME/.local/bin/nvim --headless --listen /tmp/.nvim-instance.sock

# Start Neovim listening over TCP - Less secure
# nohup nvim --listen 127.0.0.1:6666 --headless </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &

Neovide command to connect to Neovim

.local/bin/neovide-connect

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

# Connect Neovide to Neovim server

# Connect over Unix sockets
$HOME/.local/bin/neovide --server=/tmp/.nvim-instance.sock

# Connect over TCP (less secure)
# $HOME/.local/bin/neovide  --server=localhost:6666

Park Run

A very wet 5km park run today (although more preferable to a 4 hour cycle ride in the wet).

I am still quite unfit when it comes to running and so continue to have a mixture of speed walking, jogging and running. I have been getting a fairly decent time with this combination.

Today I did 5km in 35 minutes and 5 seconds, which is 20 seconds faster than last week (which had less wind and rain).

I came 37th in my age group with an age-graded score of 42.42% (double the meaning of life). The age-graded score is a measure against world record running times for a specific age range, so it seems I wont be breaking any world records for a while :)

---

Thank you.

Practical.li Website

Practical.li GitHub Org practicalli-johnny profile

@practicalli@clj.social @practical_li