Three Dollar Quill

I didn't do much worth writing about today, but I've got a few minutes... I think I mentioned before that I was messing around with my environment. At this point, I'm running fish under kitty. I've pretty well replaced Sublime Text with neovim, with the two caveats that I'll probably go back to Sublime Text for the purpose of working on pip, and I don't have a good workflow yet for replacing my old somewhat dysfunctional pattern of "just stuff in an unsaved Sublime Text window and leave it there for months".

Let me see if I can throw together a replacement quickly. Well, having another dedicated folder for saving these things is... something. It's probably more useful and sustainable than having such data who-knows-where inside Sublime Text's appdata.

Anyway, after getting all of that working, and getting past a few weird hurdles (I know I had to change my neovim color scheme to get the background to go from "unusably bright" to "noticeably brighter than under any other circumstance, but it's fine". I don't remember if there was anything else in particular.), I'm now seeing about taking advantage of some of the features this setup gives me. Shell-based visual filebrowsers seem like an interesting novelty, so I've been messing with them in particular. I don't want to go into too many specifics, because my general experience was that they didn't quite work the way I wanted, but it was hard for me to figure out why. The main sticking point is image previews, which is really a nice-to-have, but, I mean, it would be nice... I've seen the following behaviors:

• "In terminal emulators besides kitty, the preview is low-res, but in kitty, it's full-resolution" -> In kitty, the low-res preview is rendered with pixels instead of cells, resulting in what could generously be called a postage stamp.
• "If you do all of these extra steps, a full-size preview renders" -> I never get it to work.
• "Supports kitty's graphics protocol" -> Doesn't actually render previews, just runs a loading animation.
• "Scales the image down if needed" -> Does not scale the image down, resulting in the screen doing all kinds of bizarre nonsense.

In the end, I took the one that I liked the most (due to other aspects almost working excellently by default), and went through the tweaks required to make it work for me. I think there's a bit more customization to be done, but it's definitely in "conform the tools to my preferences" territory at this point.

Anyway, that's quite enough writing. This went on way longer than I meant it to, but at least I fixed up some of the tools. In the future, I should try to get this all done sooner, if I'm not going to get useful work done until I start writing about it.

EDIT: At least three of the issues above were due to a bug in fish that is fixed in the latest release. I think this vindicates my decision not to name the tools I was having trouble with. Because it wasn't their fault.

Good night.