vim via chromebook

14 Mar 2018

I’ve been experimenting with the library’s chromebook for a little over a year. It’s been fun! If you’ve never jailbroken a device before, I’d say the chromebook is a pretty good place to start. This device cost less than $200, so I wouldn’t be completely freaked out if I broke it forever.

Before this experimentation, I’d never installed linux or knew anything about different flavors and distros. I also wasn’t very adept at using the terminal. As a web developer, it’s easy to learn programming using solely GUI tools, but once you get into node and all of its libraries, you gotta transition to using the terminal. Using the chromebook in developer mode forced me to learn more about the terminal, and after drowning in youtube videos, I found myself interested in using vim. You see, sublime text is my text editor of choice, but sublime doesn’t play well with the linux distro on my raspberry pi (the raspberry pi experiments could be a whole other post…). After stumbling my way through node development via leafpad, I really missed syntax highlighting and other text editor luxuries.

I’m sure vim isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “text editor luxuries.” I know the first time I found myself in vim, I struggled to even exit.

After watching a few youtube videos, I found that vim is as extensible as you want it to be. After tweaking a few of the config settings and adding some dot files, I had a pretty sweet alternative to leafpad on my raspberry pi. Learning vim commands wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, either. I ran through vimtutor a few times, read some blog posts, and watched more youtube videos, and now I’m vim-ing away!

The library chromebook is not only for my use. When we loan it out to students, my environment gets wiped (or powerwashed, as they say in chromebook land). This probably sounds awful, but with backups, it’s pretty easy to restore my distro from a clean chromebook. Every once in a while, I choose not to reinstall a linux distro, and just stick with chromebrew and vim in crosh. Even though you can’t write to the files via crosh, you can still use vim with git to save work in the cloud.

I’ve learned a lot about vim, chromeOS, and raspberry pi during my library journey. Now that I’ve gotten my coding environment set up, I can continue learning node.