How to view Vim help in its own tab

Vim has an amazing help system, and I use it all the time. You open Vim help with a command like:

:help ^]

(which will tell you what Ctrl-] does). Vim help windows have some special properties. First, there can be only one. If no help window is open, the :help command will open one. If one is open already, the :help command will reuse it. Second, if the help window is the only window left, Vim will exit.

That makes it hard to use the full screen for help, which I often prefer to do on my 11” MacBook Air. But there is a way: we can open the help window in its own tab page.

In Vim, the screen is divided into one or more windows. Each of these windows exists in a tab page (like a browser tab). A new tab page means a whole new set of windows. Or one really bit window. Possibly showing you the help file.

Let’s say you’re typing away, when you suddenly realize you’ve forgotten what Ctrl-] does.

So you ask for help:

See how you can still what you were working on at the bottom? Sometimes that’s useful, but sometimes you’d rather have those two lines for extra help window space. All we have to do is move the current (help) window to a new tab, which is Ctrl-W T. (NB: That’s a capital T, or Shift-T. Also, for context, Ctrl-W is the prefix for most everything you can do with a window.)

Look! A brand new tab with just the help file in it! To go back to what you were working on, you can use gT to go back a tab, and then gt to go forward to the help again.

There’s one other thing: if you want to open help in a new tab from the beginning, you can just type this:

:tab help {thing to ask about}

That’s the nifty :tab command: it can go in front of a command that opens a new window to make it open a new tab instead. (See :help :tab for more info.)

How to defeat Whole Disk Encryption and other in-memory-key schemes

Steal the computer without ever turning off the power or letting the machine go to sleep.

Also useful for moving a Frogger game cabinet without losing your high scores.

Use the hell out of your Someday/Maybe lists.

I don’t think it’s advertised anymore, but Merlin Mann’s great 43 Folders site has a companion Google Group. These days it doesn’t get much traffic. I’d actually forgotten it existed until I saw this question in my inbox.

My answer explains a small nugget of GTD wisdom I’ve been able to distill over the past few months, and I’d like to share it with you here.

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On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:20 PM, DerekS wrote:

I have been on and off the wagon several times with respect to GTD and have finally noticed that all the things I want/need to get to are just floating around and making my head spin.

I go in cycles as well, and every time I get a little closer to something truly maintainable. Let me give you a tip from my latest go-round:

Use the hell out of your Someday/Maybe lists.

Before you put something on an action or project list, ask yourself: when I find myself in the context to take action on this, am I really going to do it? Do I really care? Have I actually committed to doing this, or is it just something which seems like I might want to do? If you’re not truly committing to doing it as soon as you’re in that context, put it on your Someday/Maybe list.

I keep a few S/M lists:

1. Someday Soon: Things I’ve pretty much decided I’ll do, but I haven’t decided to start working on yet. I consult this weekly.
2. Someday Perhaps: Things I’m not sure I’ll want to do, but which I don’t want to forget about. I consult this one weekly too, but with a different mindset.
3. 40,000ft Options: Basically career paths which I might like to shift to one day. I don’t consult this one much, but it’s good to have a place to put those ideas.
4. Way Out There: Crazy ideas I’ll probably never do, but which, again, I feel better for having written down.
5. Movies to Watch, Books to Read, etc: a series of lists of media I’d like to consume. I consult these when I’m looking for a good book, movie, etc.

All this means that my project and action lists have no noise. They’re all things that I’m ready to do at a moment’s notice.

For this to work, the Weekly Review is critical. If you don’t trust that you’ll see these things as often as you feel you need to see them, you’ll instinctively put them somewhere where you will. That will probably be your action and project lists. Once those become cluttered with things you haven’t actually decided to do yet, you’ll stop trusting them, and then you’ve got nothing. I’ve been through that cycle numerous times.

I used to put off my weekly reviews for all sorts of poor reasons. Just schedule an hour or two every week at the same time and check your lists for inconsistencies. You don’t even have to think very hard. If you just read over your action, project, and S/M lists, your brain will tell you when something’s in the wrong place, or out of date.

You can get better at the Weekly Review over time, but only if you actually do it. It’s far more important to do it than to do it well.

I'm joining Pivotal Labs!

I am elated to announce that as of Monday I will be joining Pivotal Labs!

If you don’t know, Pivotal Labs is an elite ninja squad of developers, trained in the art of Ekusupidō (also known as Extreme Programming). Pivotal, based in San Francisco, is growing their new(-ish) NYC office, and I’m proud to be joining the wonderful group of Pivots who work there.

Yesterday was my last day at drop.io. I worked there for just over a year, and it has been a wild and hugely valuable experience. When I arrived at drop.io, fresh out of college, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. A year later, I know what it’s like to accidentally bring down a popular website and rush out a fix. I know what it’s like to be clever with my code and confuse the hell out of my coworkers. Most importantly, now I can (usually) recognize when I’m about to do something stupid, and decide not to.

I owe drop.io a huge thanks. Thanks for taking on someone with so little experience, and thanks for letting me experiment while I found my dev-legs.

Yesterday, the team threw a little sendoff party for me. There was pizza, beer, and stories aplenty. Then Mike and Pete scurried off. When they came back, they were holding these:

I’m bowled over, guys. That is the best present ever. Though, as someone pointed out, it raises the question: can you wear a shirt with your own face on it?

A big thank-you to everyone at drop.io. I’ll see you on Twitter, I’ll see you on Foursquare, and hopefully I’ll see you at an upcoming Wet Sox game.

(Apologies if this post was a little inside whiffleball.)

Where We Came From

I had many favorite books when I was growing up, but one has always stuck with me. The book is The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science by the great Larry Gonick. It traces the history of computer science and explains how logic gates work, why a computer subtracks by adding, and why sloths count in binary. it’s as good as David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work which is, after all, the greatest book ever written. (The Way Things Work rates slightly higher, on account of its sheer inexhaustibility.)

When I arrived at Bard College as a freshman, I wanted to study Computer Science History. I had stories of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing bubbling in my mind. I wanted to learn more about where it all came from. What happy accidents and brilliant insanities had built on top of one another to construct our modern computational world?

No one would teach me the history of computer science, so I settled for what I could pick up on my own. Soon I discovered the computational pioneers of the modern era. I learned how Alan Kay created Objects; how his GUI at PARC inspired Steve Jobs and Apple to create the Macintosh, which in turn inspired Windows and set the standard for computer interfaces; how his Smalltalk inspired Objective-C and Ruby, which was also highly influenced by John McCarthy’s Lisp. I learned how Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman built the two great empires of Free Software, Linux and GNU, living in symbiosis, and leading the way for the Open-Source Movement. I learned of giants, gods, and titans, and I learned that they were my ancestors. And then I realized something:

These people are still alive.

This still boggles my mind. These are great men and women of history, and they’re not dead yet. We can still go ask them questions. We can even work with them, learn directly from them. How lucky we are to live in an age of such rapid change that our Great Old Ones are still among us!

May we young grasshoppers be wise enough to seek their wisdom.

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Corey Haines is touring the country pairing with all sorts of great programmers. As he’s travelled, he’s filmed a series called “Road Thoughts”. In his latest entry, Corey discusses the importance of learning and remembering our history. I think he’s absolutely right.