More clowning for you.
I’m not the sharpest guy. At least, not in the sense of being really quick. Sometimes my creativity will make it seem so, but I’m really not that fast. The honest truth is, if I haven’t rehearsed something in my head at least a couple of times, I can be caught off guard. I don’t learn really new stuff all that fast, but I do tend to learn well. Some things it takes me a while trying again and again.
So I am honestly not the fastest when it comes to figuring out this computer stuff. Most of my limited expertise is having done this stuff over and over and over. Sometimes it comes from getting burned a few times.
My bluetooth keyboard arrived. It won’t fit in the bag for my Android tablet, but it’s a real keyboard and I can touch-type on it without any trouble. If I expect to do any real work, I’ll drag that sucker around to make sure I can type with a measure of sanity. A writer has to write.
By the same token, I was very persistent in making the Android version of Vim work (“Vim Touch”). Once you’ve learned how to use Vim at all, you realize what a fine tool it was. I realize the keystrokes are bizarre, but they were chosen before the CUA Standards were formulated at IBM. Vim goes way back to the murky early Unix days. The version as it comes for Android is fine for coders, but for writers it takes some work, even if you already know how to use Vim.
Vim Touch is cranky at best. After installing it, you’ll need the runtimes package to go with it. My primary reason for that was to activate the spell checking. But you see, Vim Touch is pretty stupid. It comes with a blank .vimrc and you have to make sure you pedantically tell it every thing, making sure each item is on a separate line:
set spell
set spelllang=en
set nojoinspaces
set shiftwidth=3
set tabstop=3
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set whichwrap+=<,>,h,l
set incsearch
syntax on
set showcmd
set wrap
set linebreak
set breakat=\ ^I!@*-+;:,./?\(\[\{
set textwidth=0
set display=lastline
colorscheme koehler
Oh, but that’s not all. It ignores the business about spell checking unless, upon opening the first file, you specifically do the ESC and type in those two lines. Somehow that wakes it up. BTW, don’t hit the ESC key itself, but use the button in the top of the window interface. Otherwise, the thing closes on you.
You also just about have to shut down your device and restart it for Vim Touch to actually start using your new .vimrc, particularly in getting the soft wrapping on words correctly. Yes, you have to type that all in on the device itself, because the file system is hidden and you can’t just copy it over. Vim Touch won’t tell you where $HOME is because you can’t do anything with it anyway. In fact, I’m not sure how to tell it where I would like to have my saved spell check words because I can’t get Vim Touch to tell me how it reads the normal file system that I can see. So you can’t add words to your “spelldict”. But I get everything else working, and with the new keyboard, I can actually write stuff.
And my laptop didn’t work as well as I could have wished. Debian Jessie doesn’t implement suspend and hibernate properly for this machine. Nor could I get it to talk to my tablet at all. So I ran back through my options and decided to try Kubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit. It seems to be working fine. Of course, I had to go back and manually enable hibernate, because the Canonical guys are superstitious about it (or just plain stupid). It’s just an annoyance, but it reminds you that everything about computers sucks, while some things suck less and are tolerable.
I assure you that none of this is meant to recommend that you do what I do, or run what I run on my equipment. This is simply my story.
