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Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format is no more, as the creators of Pango, one of the largest text rendering libraries, announced a few months back.

Until recently, Pango used FreeType to draw fonts. They will be moving over to Harfbuzz, an evolution of FreeType.

Why?

In short, FreeType was hard to work with. It required complex logic, and provided no advantage over Harfbuzz (other than being able to fetch opentype metrics with ease).

Upgrading to Pango v1.44 will break your GTK applications (if you use a bdf/pcf bitmap font). Harfbuzz does support bitmap-only OpenType fonts though, otbs. Convert your existing fonts over to otbs using FontForge. It is to be noted that applications such as xterm and rxvt use xft (X FreeType) to render fonts, and will remain unaffected by the update.

Both scientifica and curie will soon ship with bitmap-only OpenType font formats.

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Onivim is a ‘modern modal editor’, combining fancy interface and language features with vim-style modal editing. What’s wrong you ask?

Apart from buggy syntax highlighting, broken scrolling and others, Onivim is proprietary software. It is licensed under a commercial end user agreement license, which prohibits redistribution in both object code and source code formats.

Onivim’s core editor logic (bits that belong to vim), have been separated from the interface, into libvim. libvim is licensed under MIT, which means, this ‘extension’ of vim is perfectly in adherence to vim’s license text! Outrun Labs are exploiting this loophole (distributing vim as a library) to commercialize Onivim.

Onivim’s source code is available on GitHub. They do mention that the source code trickles down to the oni2-mit repository, which (not yet) contains MIT-licensed code, 18 months after each commit to the original repository.

Want to contribute to Onivim? Don’t. They make a profit out of your contributions. Currently, Onivim is priced at $19.99, ‘pre-alpha’ pricing which is 80% off the final price! If you are on the lookout for an editor, I would suggest using Vim, charity ware that actually works, and costs $100 lesser.

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Bash is tricky, don’t let your editor get in your way. Here’s a couple of neat additions you could make to your vimrc for a better shell programming experience.

---

Man pages inside vim

Source this script to get started:

runtime ftplugin/man.vim

Now, you can open manpages inside vim with :Man! It adds nicer syntax highlighting and the ability to jump around with Ctrl-] and Ctrl-T.

By default, the manpage is opened in a horizontal split, I prefer using a new tab:

let g:ft_man_open_mode = 'tab'

---

Scratchpad to test your commands

I often test my sed substitutions, here is a sample from the script used to generate this site:

# a substitution to convert snake_case to Title Case With Spaces
echo "$1" | sed -E -e "s/\..+$//g"  -e "s/_(.)/ \u\1/g" -e "s/^(.)/\u\1/g"

Instead of dropping into a new shell, just test it out directly from vim!

• Yank the line into a register:

  yy
  

• Paste it into the command-line window:

  q:p
  

• Make edits as required:

  syntax off            # previously run commands
  edit index.html       # in a buffer!
  w | so %
  !echo "new_post.md" | sed -E -e "s/\..+$//g"  --snip--
  ^--- note the use of '!'
  

• Hit enter with the cursor on the line containing your command!

  $ vim
  New Post         # output
  Press ENTER or type command to continue
  

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Often times, when I run a vim command that makes “big” changes to a file (a macro or a :vimgrep command) I lose my original position and feel disoriented.

Save position with winsaveview()!

The winsaveview() command returns a Dictionary that contains information about the view of the current window. This includes the cursor line number, cursor coloumn, the top most line in the window and a couple of other values, none of which concern us.

Before running our command (one that jumps around the buffer, a lot), we save our view, and restore it once its done, with winrestview.

let view = winsaveview()
s/\s\+$//gc              " find and (confirm) replace trailing blanks
winrestview(view)        " restore our original view!

It might seem a little overkill in the above example, just use “ (double backticks) instead, but it comes in handy when you run your file through heavier filtering.

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1. reselecting previously selected text (i use this to fix botched selections):

   gv  " :h gv for more
       " you can use `o` in visual mode to go to the `Other` end of the selection
       " use a motion to fix the selection
   

2. reselecting previously yanked text:

   `[v`]
   `[         " marks the beginning of the previously yanked text   :h `[
   `]         " marks the end                                       :h `]
    v         " visual select everything in between
   
   nnoremap gb `[v`]    " "a quick map to perform the above
   

3. pasting and indenting text (in one go):

   ]p   " put (p) and adjust indent to current line
   ]P   " put the text before the cursor (P) and adjust indent to current line
   

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