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Dinner to aid startup co-op grocery

By Eric Weddle
Sep 19, 2008
Lafayette Journal & Courier

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I use DokuWiki for my business site, Wineskin Media, and I recently ran into a snag and went to the IRC channel for help. Andreas Gohr, the author of DokuWiki, not only took time to answer my question, he also decided to feature Wineskin Media as a DokuWiki of the month. Pretty neat.

(That's the xterm16 colorscheme with transparency turned on, using the mrxvt terminal with transparency on, a tint of #000020, and shading of 85. Background image: "View on Dubrovnik".)

Anyhow, as you can see, even the sparse syntax of Marxdown is far easier to read when the syntax is highlighted in different colors. You can even get things like bold highlighting, even though the underlying file is still clean, plain text. Mere asterisks let Vim know to color a word bold. No hidden codes are required; what you see is what's really in the file, but Vim can add colors. Vim isn't the first or only program out there that does syntax highlighting, of course. Any reputable text editor should do it.

My contributions

There many kinds of plain text in the world. This file uses Markdown syntax, but a PHP file would need PHP syntax, a CSS file would need CSS syntax, and so on. Each kind requires its own "syntax file", so Vim knows how to treat it.

Vim comes with quite a pile of syntax files, and the community has contributed even more at the Vim site under "Scripts". Every so often, however, I come across a kind of file that no one has needed syntax highlighting for yet. Fortunately, it's relatively straightforward to write your own syntax file. Here are the ones I've written, and uploaded.

You can find my Vim contributions here.

NoSQL and tab-separated files.

When you get hooked on plain text, you start trying to do everything with it. Tab-separated files are a simple way to store simple data. But I wanted each column to be a different color.

At the time, I was using a collection of shell scripts called NoSQL to access these tables, so I named the syntax file nosql.vim. I still use NoSQL for some old scripts, but lately I've needed the power of perl (DBI and DBI::AnyData) to access these files. DBI is a neat perl module because the syntax is the same whether you're talking to a MySQL database or a plain text TSV.

Anyhow, with this syntax file, columns appear in different colors. Keeps things sane.

get nosql.vim

DokuWiki

I've just this morning finally put up my syntax file for DokuWiki, the wiki I currently use for Wineskin Media. It's not from scratch, just a modification of a Wikipedia syntax file, but if you happen to use DokuWiki, you may find it useful.

get dokuwiki.vim

Make your own syntax file

It's really not so hard. Just open Vim, and

:h syntax

Actually, a better idea is to copy an existing syntax file and work from there. Just find one that isn't bewilderingly complicated. :)

You can almost imagine he's smiling, which is not bad for the evening of his birth.

Unfortunately, even the healthiest of babies seems to look a little beat up when they first get out. Fortunately, the skin clears up surprisingly fast.

I wrote a minor epic when our first child was born, and waxed at some length for our second. For Nathaniel, I trust you'll be satisfied with this interesting fact: Nathaniel arrived early -- that is, he arrived before the midwife. And that arrival was lovely.

As you can deduce from the pictures, it has been rather awhile since he was born (cough), and Nathaniel has even been duly baptized. He was a little young for the snappy white suit that one of the other boys sported, but I'm starting to wonder if our plan to use one unisex baptismal gown for all the kids is going to work.

I'm just glad that whoever stuffs other people's babies into flower suits and fake pots and courts future lawsuits by hawking them on greeting cards wasn't around to get visions of Mother Ginger.

(Which reminds me: all baby pictures on this site are copyrighted and may not be used for anything except excessive viewing by friends and relatives. I've been considering a more distributist license for most of my online content, but family pictures will be locked up permanently, or until such greeting cards finally inspire universal cultural outrage. Go wear your own sunflower suit.)

Anyhow, I'd forgotten what a newborn is like. I'm beginning to despair of even attempting to describe certain happenings until I learn how to draw or write verse. But here Nathaniel is, whole and entire, another stranger claiming Preferred Member Status in our little club. We all give him a warm welcome, and look forward to a fuller acquaintance.

I'll be surprised if this comic isn't all over the place in a few hours, but you may as well see it here.

Of course, writing drivers for hardware is a wee bit easier when the companies actually talk to you. The laugh for me might not be what the author intends; not because peripherals are always broken on Linux (they aren't) but because the power of Linux makes the newbie redefine "broken" so rapidly. In Windows, "broken" used to mean that the computer crashed more than once or twice a day. In Linux, a "broken" Xorg might just mean that some default setting in the distribution prevents me from running multiple instances at the same time. "Broken" starts to mean, "it won't do exactly what I'm imagining it could." Linux can become the most addicting computer game ever devised.