Tag Archives: vim

On the Joys of vim-like Browsing

Reflections on Pointlessness

One of the great delights in this life is pointless optimisation. Point-ful optimisation has its place of course; it is right and proper and sensible, and, well, useful, and it also does, when first achieved, yield considerable satisfaction. But I have found I soon adjust to the newly more efficient (and equally drab) normality, and so the spell fades quickly.

Not so with pointless optimisation. Pointless optimisation, once attained, is a preternaturally persistent source of joy that keeps on giving indefinitely. Particularly if it involves acquiring a skill of some description; if the task optimised is frequent; and if the time so saved could not possibly compensate for the time and effort sunk into the optimisation process. Words cannot convey the triumph of completing a common task with hard-earned skill and effortless efficiency, knowing full-well it makes no difference whatsoever in the grand scheme of things.

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Unreasonably faster notes, with command-line fuzzy search

A good note system should act like a second brain:

  1. Accessible in seconds
  2. Adding information should be frictionless
  3. Searching should be exhaustive – if it’s there, you must find it

The benefits of such a note system are immense – never forget anything again! Search, perform the magic ritual of Copy Paste, and rejoice in the wisdom of your tried and tested past.

But how? Through the unreasonable effectiveness of interactive fuzzy search. This is how I have used Fuz, a terminal-based file fuzzy finder, for about 4 years.

Briefly, Fuz extracts all text within a directory using ripgrep, enables interactive fuzzy search with FZF, and returns you the selected item. As you type, the search results get narrowed down to a few matches. Files are opened at the exact line you found. And it’s FAST – 100,000 lines in half a second fast.

Using Fuz to quickly add a code-snippet in our note directory – then retrieving it with fuzzy-search. Here, on how to read FASTA files with Biopython, conveniently added to a file called biopython.py.
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