Switching to NeoVim (Part 1)
2016-11-03 Update: Now using the XDG-compliant configuration location.
NeoVim is all the rage these days, and I can't help but be similarly enthused. Unlike other editors, which have varying degrees of crappiness with their Vim emulation, NeoVim is Vim.
If it's Vim, why bother switching? Much like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares, NeoVim has a different set of aspirations and features. While vanilla Vim has the (noble and important) goal of supporting all possible platforms, that legacy has seemingly held it back from eliminating warts and adding new features. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it's stable, bad because it can lead to stagnation. A Vim contributor, annoyed with how the project was seemingly hamstrung by this legacy (with its accompanying byzantine code structure, project structure, and conventions), decided to take matters into his hands and fork the editor.
The name of the fork? NeoVim.
It brings quite a lot to the table, and deserves a blog post or two in its own right. I'll leave the diffing as an exercise to the reader. I plan on writing about some of those differences as I do more with the fork's unique features.
Accessing Webcams with Python
So, I've been working on a tool that turns your commit messages into image macros, named Lolologist. This was a great learning exercise because it gave me insight into things I haven't encountered before - namely:
- Packaging python modules
- Hooking into Git events
- Using PIL (through Pillow) to manipulate images and text
- Accessing a webcam through Python on *nix-like platforms
I might talk to the first three at a later point, but the latter was the most interesting to me as someone who enjoys finding weird solutions to nontrivial problems.
Perusing the internet results in two third-party tools for "python webcam linux": Pygame & OpenCV. Great! Only problem is these come in at 10MB and 92MB respectively. Wanting to keep the package light and free of unnecessary dependencies, I set out to find a simpler solution...