Month: November 2017

Art

Gesture in Oil on Manila Paper

Practicing gestures in oil is a great way to gain more experience in handling paint. Here is a quick study of a ballet dancer shown in 2 phases:

Knowledge

Lizard Brain, False Reality and the Death of Dreams

The lizard brain can seriously inhibit intelligent decision-making. It’s not that the decision will even sound wrong, under the circumstances it might well be the right thing to do. But the threat might only be perceived and the danger not be real. It could be just a false alarm that triggers the sense of danger.

The truth is that the real danger is willing to sacrifice dreams for “perceived” reality. Perceived reality is often scary. And fear is the real dream killer.

How to tell? We feel bad when we don’t get to do the thing we really want to do. We can fool ourselves in to thinking that it’s not really that bad. But the test is simple. How do you feel? Are you doing the thing that brings you the highest joy? Are you acting on your highest passion?

technology

Sublime Text 3 – Vi Keybinding to Exit Insert Mode

While the “escape” key has been the usual norm to exit “insert mode” into “visual mode”, the original vi editor encouraged and heavily used the “ctrl+[” keybinding to exit visual mode. Why should we care? Because “ctrl+[” is a lot closer to the fingers and more ergonomic, while hitting the “escape” key moves the left hand out of the home row position. Of course we assume that you remapped your Caps key to ctrl also 🙂

Here is the entry for the Sublime Text keymap file to bind “ctrl+[” to “escape” into visual mode:

{ "keys": ["ctrl+["], "command": "exit_insert_mode" }

On a sidenote: I cannot think of anyone would need to use the Caps key on a computer keyboard. Context is everything, the Caps key was important in the typewriter days because how else can text be made bold or italic. Capitalizing text was often the norm and it did’t indicate shouting as it does now.

The original vi manual, rather the paper “An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi” by Bill Joy has a very useful and quality tutorial that I have not seen matched even by commercial modern Vim/Vi books. You can get the PDF from the freebsd.org vi docs section here.