PTPL 112 · Organise Your Stuff— Alternatives to Bartender and Hazel

Plus some Obsidian plugins to make life easier without messing with your plain text

This week I share 4 links to utilities that can organise your digital world without messing with your plain text data, and ask: what are your top 10 Vim commands for complete beginners?

No AI here; all words, ideas, and faults 100% human made. While paid subscribers are enormously encouraging and help me to keep writing, non-subscribers are always welcome to read for free.

Welcome to a shorter edition of this weekly missive. A work deadline and the dreaded lurgy have kept me company for the past few days, so I’m taking it easy for a bit.

Throwback—Seeing how nicely my productivity system handles neglect: 2023-06-19 PTPL 057 - A Productivity System Under Stress - 5 Insights While Traveling

4 Nice Finds

1. A very nice guide to Markdown, from an HTML perspective. I learned that you can write tables in HTML and they show up nicely in Obsidian, but not iA Writer. There are many Markdown helper features in apps available these days that I can’t see any reason to write a table in HTML.
2. Organise is an open source alternative to Hazel that runs in the command line. I hope to try it out once I ‘graduate’ from Johnny’s online tutorage (see below).
3. Obsidian plugins that won’t affect your plain text data — Lou Plummer’s list is a good example of enjoying the conveniences that some apps provide, while keeping your data unchanged and entirely within your control. There’s a bee buzzing around in my brain on this topic, so I’m sure to write more about it later. For now, here’s a scrolling plugin I installed this week via BRAT — especially handy on mobile devices.
4. A run-down of Bartender alternatives for people worried about what the new owners might be doing with their data. I’m happy to stick with Bartender for now as I haven’t yet found an alternative that measures up. Someone told me recently that Ice’s roadmap indicates it might eventually be a real contender.

Learning the Command Line Update

Johnny Decimal is teaching me the command line. He welcomes input on the way he’s demystifying this baffling super power, so feel free to join in the conversation on the Fediverse.

This week I’ve installed Homebrew, and checked that it works. Next stop: installing hLedger. In the coming week I’ll be reviewing the syntax for entering data, and making sure my chart of accounts is where it needs to be.

I asked people on Mastodon what their top 10 Vim commands would be for a complete beginner, and here’s one of the responses:

:x
 :q!
 h j k l
 w b
 x p
 dd cc
 ciw
 daw
 v +v
 % to match braces

So far I’m practicing with :q!, h j k l, w b, G g. What would your top 10 be? Let me know in the comments, or on Mastodon.

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