There are a few small things I'd like to rebuild today which were annoying me for the past few months.
My editor
I've been using helix since (checks dotfiles) the end of June 2024. The reason I switched initially was that I didn't like installing a package manager into neovim and not knowing what half of my config did. I have 2 problems with helix:
- non-standard keymap (see Tris's video for more info on that)
- a lot of features that I don't use.
Reasons for going back to neovim specifically:
- I've found an article on setting up LSP from scratch
- It works in the terminal, so plays nice with zellij.
It's been a while since I've tried configuring nvim, so I took the basic setup from this article.
The default hotkey for showing the diagnostics is <C-w>d, control window diagnosics, which I find completely reasonable.
The colorscheme is weird though. Since I don't want any huge plugins, I've decided to take vim's theme and it's not the same as the helix's! Okay, I'll adapt helix's theme.
After fighting it for an hour I gave up and cloned the official catppuccin theme manually (I still don't want a plugin manager). I don't want it to pollute the root of my config, so I put it in .config/nvim/pack/vendor/start/catppuccin, which I learned about from this article. Great article by the way, I now know that I can use ansible or a shell script as my plugin manager. Then I added a fallback in case the theme is not installed.
With the editor done, I can now move onto
CSS on my website
My problem with the current CSS file is that it's 226 lines, does almost nothing and yet has some strong opinions. The way I want to shrink it down is by having a few utility classes and nothing else. That won't work for markdown pages though, so I'll add a separate file there.
Okay, not just utility classes, I need a reset.
I've tried writing utils like .row, .col, .items-center, .sticky, .sideways and I don't like them. They feel like tailwind. But worse. I'll make a few semantic blocks:
Okay, I've ended up kind of rethinking the design system a bit.
The site now has 2 layouts: one for the garden and the other for other apps.
Each note can be in 4 states:
- idea (lightbulb)
- in progress (construction)
- done (checkmark)
- irrelevant (shredder)
The API
And that's a new project. I'm writing this line on 2026-01-02, the rest of the note was completed on 2025-12-06, this was supposed to be a quick one day project, I'm not doing it here.
2026-01-06 update, it was moved to mk-api.