Encore: Reaper SubProjects

When making highly technical dance music one technique is to build a synth riff, EQ'd and effected up. Then the riff is frozen, chopped up, effected more, reversed, etc. Maybe that gets frozen and the tweaking and trashing repeats. At each iteration, the musician listens for gold nuggets. The best clips get utilized in the song.

In Reaper there is an amazing tools that makes this technique super-powered. A synth can be added to a project, if it makes the sounds the musician wants, a riff can be written. That track can then be 'opened in a subproject'. The subproject opens in a new tab. Effects can then be added to the track. When the project is saved the riff is rendered as a wave. At any time the riff in the main project can be double clicked to open the subproject. Notes can be changed and effects tweaked etc. When it is saved the riff is re-rendered.

It's amazing, and makes the whole process much less painful, and adds complete flexibility.

Are Amoebas Minimal?

Because the Amoeba text editor, or Android sure is. And so far I love it. There is one little toolbar across the top of the screen... and that's it. The file menu is accessed way down in the bottom right corner of the screen. There are no tabs, although two documents can be open at once. I for one hate tabbars. Especially on an OS that allows you to swipe. Just swipe left or right to navigate through the open documents.

It has a great 'magnifier' tool during selection and cursor moving, but there is no select all command that I've seen. This is a must. It's terrible selecting all text in larger files. That is the only real issue so far. Other than that I'm really liking it so far!

Check it out here
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softevol.amoeba&hl=en

Finding Hidden Treasure

I always run Vim with folding in tab level mode. Looking at less code is always preferrable. I am not a fan of scrolling through thousands of lines of code. The other night I was working and stumbled upon a VIM gold nugget that will change the way I move around in my favorite editor.

Which brings to mind just how often, after years of using VIM, I still find new surprises. True, I am not an active student of VIM. I don't go out and read books or tutorials on it. I am a fairly basic user actually. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, I don't use any plugins in VIM and my vimrc is very barebones. It sets up folding via indentation, a common backups directory, tabbing settings, line numbering, hiding ALL GUI elements, etc. But still, every week there is something new!

What I uncovered was navigating to the next/previous fold. I should have thought of it before, it is absolutely VIMish:

z,j or z,k

z,j Moves to the next fold.

z,k Moves to the previous fold.

If you didn't know this already, you're welcome!

Ink Love

I am currently doing some illustration side work. I am doing digital images so I'm using Inkscape. It's been a while since I've used it, so I've forgotten just how great Inkscape is. I am very obsessive when working with graphics. Everything is within its proper layer. Every object is properly named. Where applicable objects are grouped - and of course the group is named. I do a lot in the XML dialog. I like to arrange my objects in the stack from this dialog. I also do most of my object selection from the XML dialog.

Of course the object dialog is also my friend. I use it often to lock or hide objects. This is also the dialog I use to name objects, I can do so in the XML dialog but it is more tedious there. It's much easier in the object dialog where I don't have to touch my mouse to get it done.

I am definitely no expert. But I do love me some Inkscape.

A Little App Shuga

Now that I'm denied my all-time favorite app (And consequently all my favorite headless Linux apps) GnuRoot, I'm on the market for apps to try and sort of fill the void. Aka lightweight or open source, minimalistic apps. Here's what I have so far.

Editors:

Jota+ (paid)
I've had Jota for years now. I haven't used it since finding GnuRoot... But now it's all I use - VIM on Android just isn't there. Once I get full on Nix going again I'll be back to VIM. Until then Jota it is.

Files:

TotalCommander (free - no ads)
I love this app. It's clean and ad free. It's not constantly trying to get me to download other utilities *ahem esfile explorer*. With the LAN extension installed it's nice and easy to copy files to and from your computers.

Music:

Musicolet (free - no ads - internet)
I've mentioned this one before. I recently found Musicolet when my old player kept munching on my battery. This app is ad-free and doesn't even utilize your web connection so it's nice and light weight, not querying for artwork etc. And it's a great player. A little weird at first with the multiple queues thing but once you're used to it the queues are pretty cool.

Chatting:

QKSMS (open source)
I just found this one. I wasn't looking for a texting app, but in a search for open source apps, it showed up. So far it's really cool. You can tweak the look and feel quite a bit. So far it's not buggy etc. And it's open source.

No GnuRoot No Nothin

So GnuRoot won't run on my new phone. Ok. Fine. I'll just use some other non-root terminal/Linux emulator... Or maybe not.

Judging by the comments in the play store it seems I'm not the only nerd who is unable to run GnuRoot. I'm not sure what's new in Android, but it seems far more locked down than the version my old phone was running. If so, I guess the OS is still going in the wrong direction. :/

Well there's nothing out there like GnuRoot. Busybox I believe is broken like GnuRoot. In Termux I have VIM available, that's good. But as I was messing with it I couldn't get my VIMRC to apply. Then it got worse, I couldn't open files in my documents directory. I could save files within the Termux file system, but where is that?
I did searchss for files I had stored there but got no results.

Soo Termux and the other emulators are isolated little file systems with no IO. I don't know if Google is rolling their own SUPER locked down Android OS, or if  this is standard in the latest release. But it sucks to get a $$$ phone and have the jerk companies that made it  restrict what you can do with YOUR phone even more.

So I'm stuck. I can't even run proper VIM. When I was able to run GnuRoot I could code, compile and run full on Java jars, I had a ton of apps available through apt-get. It was JUST like having full blown headless Linux on my phone.

Sad.

Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger

Well it was about that time. The old phone had to be put out to pasture. No more green line across my screen. No more 20% battery drain per hour. No more GnuRoot... wait, what?!?

I picked up a Pixel2 Extra Large or whatever it's called. I wanted to JUST transfer my msg history and contacts from my Droid, no apps etc. Turns out I got my contacts, and my apps for some reason. Not my msg history. meh, whatever.

I have to say... I've never tried the Gboard keyboard. I love it. So many options, and I can style it to be super minimal. But most important, cursor moving via sliding along the space bar. WHAT?!? That is so great! Precise cursor positioning w/out arrow keys is a nightmare.

Sadly, as I mentioned, GnuRoot won't run. I'm guessing it is the Android version that is giving it grief. Hopefully in the near future it will run.

Wrong App

My phone is now beyond its warranty, so of course I am seeing immediate decline in its performance (*ahem* conthpirathy). My battery life was by far the most troubling. I woukd charge it up to 100% and after about fifteen minutes in the car it'd be at 80% or less.

I started watching the battery charge chart and obsessively monitor what apps were using how much. The biggest offenders were Life360 (Which I can't remove, have to keep tabs on the family you know), AIMP, GnuRoot. I started going through the options for these apps, turning off features I didn't need etc.

But my battery was still getting pounded. Of these offenders onoy one is pretty much always running - AIMP. If I wasn't playing music it was sitting queued up. I turned off the options that retrieve album art or ID3 information, but it still seemed to be sucking my battery dry.

As much as I loved AIMP it was time to say good bye. I hit the store and found a free, no ads, no internet capability mp3 player called Musicolet. The difference was immediate. My phone battery life doubled or tripled. I need more apps like Musicolet!

The right apps make all the difference.

All My Keyboards

There are a lot of keyboards on my phone. Most of them are there because I do unconventional things on my phone - like using VIM in GnuRoot. Because of this I need keyboards with keys such as Escape, or Tab (Although I just realized / remembered GnuRoot has an Esc special key so many of the keyboards can go away.

But before I start uninstalling I'll share with you some of the developers' keyboards I've tried so far.

Behe Keyboard
This one makes me sad. It is a free open source keyboard. It has Tab, Arrow keys, and even F1-F12 keys. But at least with T-UI, the keyboard doesn't work. When I type keys nothing happens. So for now I'll have to uninstall it.

Perfect Keyboard
This is a great keyboard. The keys are easy to hit and you can make it super minimal. It has a Tab key but no escape so I haven't used it much. I did buy it though. Now that I have the GnuRoot Esc key remembered, I'm giving it a go, in fact it is the keyboard this is being written with.

Hacker's Keyboard
This one has ALL the keys, but only when you are in the correct layout. That layout mimicks a standard desktop keyboard, but unless you are on a large keyboard, good luck hitting the keys you want.

Super Keyboard
This one has a Tab key but it looks like an interface from a 1990s video game. If that is what you are after, definitely use this one.

Fluxed and Flummoxed

I am really enjoying Fluxbox. An interesting statement for a KDE fan to make. Or not. I love the customizability of KDE and Plasma works great (Well it did until the latest update). But as I believe I've written about, I love the Black Arch theme. So I went online and found that distro's file repo. I found the Fluxbox configs.

I had never used Flux before. But I wanted the BA theme. So I installed Fluxbox. It was actually pretty easy to get the theme rolled and figure out enough of the basics to get my system as I like it. There were definitely things I had to live without, but nothing terribly painful.

I'm glad I did this... I ended up back in Plasma, but decided I should check for updates and get everything current. Plasma quit working. I couldn't get logged in etc - it just froze as soin as I clicked to login or reboot etc.

So I switched my desktop to Flux and everything was good. Until the doom I encountered installing the latest Linux Mint.

I have since gone back to Fluxbox nearly exclusively. But I tried Reaper in it the other night. I hadn't yet worked with the music production app in Flux yet. The experience was... interesting. I have to run Reaper via Wine. Flux did very strange things with my windows. At times Reaper would behave as though I set it to always on top, other times it behaved properly. It all was dependent upon the windows/dialogs I had open. At one point the Reaper window moved below all the other windows and I couldn't get to it without minimizing everything else.

I'll have to look into what window management options there are for Flux. Maybe I'm missing something.

Viva RSS

So I started on my goal of putting together information gathering resources. I would much rather explore informative and mind blowing content rather than mindlessly Facebook (Facehole) for far too long each day.

I decided to start with RSS feeds. They are simple and I could amass all kinds of resources into one RSS client. And most likely that client could handle other source types as well. I decided to go with gReader... for no apparent reason. It just looked the most promising of the first few search results I got back.

A couple hours later... I am hooked up.

Daily puzzles, physics papers and blogs, java, linux, kernel, VIM, watches, tech nerdery. It's all flooding in. It has been forever since I've checked out RSS feeds. It's cool to see them flourishing still. I'll expand to other feed sources etc, but until then I'm diggin gReader.

Check out gReader here.

Keyboard Power!

I know I have written about command-based launchers before, as well as other topics mentioned below - but I just realized how thorough my migration into the terminal is. I spend nearly all my computer time in terminals, Windows command prompts, VIM, GnuRoot. Even my phone's default launcher - T-UI - is a terminal. I launch phone apps etc by issuing commands.

Really the only time I'm reaching over for my mouse is when I have to do something on a website that uses JS in such a way that QuteBrowser's mouseless tools don't work. Or sometimes my workday tools like Outlook, Skype etc require some mousing.

I love being able to work without having to interrupt the flow to reach over and mouse around, then go back to typing. - This is why I dislike Apple's OS's, I was never able to get away from having to mouse to do nearly everything. Last time I was on a OSX, I couldn't even close dialogs etc w/out mousing. I tried Escape, nope. I tried tabbing to the Cancel button to hit Enter, nope. It was so frustrating. Of course it was probably that I just didn't know how to configure my OS, never the less my first impression was made.

All hail the keyboard!

On my phone I enter the first few letters of the app I want to launch, hints show up (The tab key is sadly buried in most mobile keyboards) and I touch the one I want. - Or I can be really hardcore and just type the full name out.

On my personal boxes I set up my global hotkeys to use Krunner as my launcher. I type the first few letters of the app I want and tab down to the desired result and hit enter. Or in some cases I just launch from the terminal, and have some bashrc entries to make this even easier (As in the case of Reaper which I run via Wine).

On my work boxes I have shortcuts in my home Dir. These allow me to enter the shortcut's name into the run prompt.

So on every machine I have, I kick off apps, not by clicking an icon etc, but by entering text into a launcher or terminal... that is - when I need an app outside the terminal.

I love it.

IRC On Your Phone

If you're like me, you miss the good old IRC days. If you don't know, IRC is a powerful and refreshingly utilitarian social network that has been around forever.

While MySpacers were blinging out their homepages with horrible gifs that tanked everyone's AOL dialup, IRC was quietly doing its thing.

When the 'get rich by blogging' thing happened, IRC was still there doing its thing.

While Facebookers politick and generally piss each other off, IRC is still alive doing its thing.

If you're sick of bloated apps and websites hosing your CPU and or battery, ditch those social feeds and jump on the text-only IRC networks. I'll talk more about IRC itself in the future. Here I just want to give you some tools to get you started IRC'ing on your phone. I've only used a couple different tools on my phone so I will start with those. Surely in the future I will be sharing more.

For the Faint of Heart
(In other words, the sane ones)

AndChat for Android is a great IRC client. I tried a couple others but AndChat seems to be the best, so far, at keeping and re-establishing IRC connections. The connection is the roughest part when using IRC on your phone. Its interface is clean and clutter free. You can set up multiple saved servers and auto join channels etc. I am kind of a basic IRC user so I haven't explored its other tools. I just do my work manually, in IRC.

For the Nerds
(me)

IRSSI. I love me some IRSSI. It is a console based IRC client that has been around forever. It's powerful and can be extended with scripts. Minimalists can run it without any tweaks etc and enjoy its scant interface, but I believe it can be tweaked to have more GUI elements. I'll have to research that.
It isn't going to be native to your phone so you're going to have to find another way to run it (This is - in part - why I say it's for nerds). I personally use GnuRoot Debian and install IRSSI via apt, just like I would on a desktop.

Enjoy checking out IRC. And watch for future IRC topics!

Firefox Killed Vimperator

According to this tweet Vimperator is dead. I haven't yet dug into the exact reason but my guess is that Firefox is probably going the way of Chrome in severely restricting what plug-ins are able to do in the browser.

I find this apparent trend of taking functionality away VERY frustrating. If I have to use a web browser every day - why can't I make it look as I please (In my case no GUI at all)? I understand trying to get rid of bloat etc. But it seems that everywhere I look we are having features and the ability to tweak our software taken away from us.

Microsoft's Visual Studio removed macros. What?! You HAD a fully functional and amazingly useful feature and you TOOK IT OUT?! I still cannot understand that one.

But back to you, web browsers. You don't let us define our own hotkeys you don't let us always hide the tab bar. Chrome, you don't even let us add notes to our bookmarks.

And on mobile OSs - the area of growth AND where people may eventually do full on computer-ing you don't allow us to put bookmarks in folders or nothin. We're expected to go onto a desktop to do that?

I find it frustrating that we once had tweaking freedom and now we're locked into a uniform UI. Yeah sure MySpace was ugly and annoying with all the tweaking and blingy gifs but at least people had the freedom to make their accounts their own - to express themselves.

Now we're all in assigned GUI uniforms. Obediently marching down the narrow row of approved features and functionality.

Pfff.

VIM Tips - I Never Knew!

As I've mentioned before, I use VIM for everything. I often use the e command to select words, without selecting beyond the end of the word. The w command will grab the space after the word as well as the intended word itself.

The other day I inadvertently (As is so often the case) found the E command. This will select words like IP addresses but stop at the end of the word, excluding the space.

This is very handy! For work I deal with IPs every week and this new found command makes my life much easier.

5 of the Best Freewares Evar

I have to have my little utilities. A stock, freshly built machine is nice but it doesn't take long for me to miss my usual set of tools. Listed below are five of my all-time favorites.
 

Oh, and... Every app below is cross platform.

VIM
I use VIM for EVERYTHING. Notes, development, everything. If I'm stuck on Dohs it's probably the first thing I install. On Nix, I make sure I've got the GTK variant so it interacts with the clipboard correctly. If you eschew VIM for NEOVIM etc, cool. Either one.

Double Commander
The very next app I install after a rebuild is Double Commander. I don't even know how many years I've been using this file manager. It's been a trusted companion for a very long time. It's snappy and has all the features I need. Most important, I can hide ALL of its UI elements, even the tabs. If I'm not doing file work in the console, Double Commander is what I'm rolling.

CopyQ
This powerhouse clipboard manager is fairly new to me but it has proven itself so far. It has replaced Ditto on Dohs and Klipper on Nix. It has far better organizing than Ditto and doesn't use that second clipboard in Nix, you know the one that stubbornly copies selected text etc.

Jreepad
I just recently started using the Java version of Treepad again for bookmarks / notes. I like its minimal UI and it's more powerful than using a browser's bookmarks manager. I like treeviews so Jreepad makes sense for me.

Qutebrowser
This one is also newer to me, but since I love VIM, a VIM web browser is a no brainer. And unlike Vimperator which is a Firefox plugin, its host isn't constantly breaking it.

Qutebrowser > *

As I have mentioned before, I love VIM, therefore I like making everything look and act like it. I ditched Chrome, going back to Firefox just so I could run Vimperator and have the browser's entire GUI go away - tabs and everything. But I'm always a bit nervous about Firefox releasing updates that break Vimperator and other plugins. So periodically I'll poke around and see what my options are.

I've tried Vimb but so far have been unable to get it to install - make whines about a missing req - I read up on it, try the various solutions people suggest... SPLAT same error.

In the past I've seen Qutebrowser mentioned in threads etc and I believe at one point I tried installing it. Apparently I didn't try very hard. I just got it installed and running. First impression: YES!

Changing settings are nice and painless, and inherantly persistant. This is really nice, even though it isn't very VIM-ish. In this regard Vimperator is much more 'in the spirit' but whatever, I'm lazy, I'll take it! Nearly everything is pretty straightforward for the VIM/Vimperator user. It did take me a bit to figure out how to open new tabs. It looked like :tab-clone was the only option. Thanks to IRC I found out you can to :open -t and leave the URL off.
Tab switching is different in QB, good old gt command is there, but it doesn't simply cycle through or go to the number you may have entered before entering gt, it requests a tab number from you, displaying your options. This is not a problem once you realize T will cycle forward through the tabs.

So far the only thing I DO miss from Vimperator is the bookmarking. Bookmarks were more powerful in Vimperator (From what I know so far and have seen in the docs). But no matter, I need to have my bookmarks synced anyway so I'll probably continue to use FF for my bookmarks.

Qutebrowser is amazing so far!

Choose Your Keys, Any Keys

It seems strange to me in a world where a huge chunk of our computing time is done on mobile devices using virtual keyboards we are stuck with rigid imitations of physical keyboards. It would be great to be able to fully customize which keys are available and where, AND which keys are available in the various alt levels of the keyboard.
 

As a GnuRoot / VIM user, I am often frustrated at the lack of Escape or Tab or Arrow keys. I have found a few keyboards that work fairly well, and contain these 'power user' keys. But given that in time tablets and phones may be the only computers we own shouldn't nearly every keyboard offer ALL the keys?

Perhaps someday I'll have to learn how to write keyboard apps and create such a customizable beast, so far I haven't seen any similar abominations.

Teleportation in VIM

Ok so teleportation is not possible in VIM... but close (In a way hehe). I'm talking about the indispensable CD to the current buffer's location command. I use it every single day, all throughout the day.

This golden command is:

:cd %:p:h

I usually put it in a Dir alias within my VIMRC.

So if I'm working on code updates and help file updates... I would have one or more code files open. They are in:

<proj root>/code/

And I'd have one or more of the help files open in another VIM tab (Yes I use tabs, sorry). The help files are in:

<proj root>/config/help/topics/

I am working on the code pieces so my working directory is:
 

<proj root>/code/

But I need to open or create some help files to reflect my code changes. I could easily accomplish this by having two different console tabs running VIM, but what if I'm just working around in various project directories. Like maybe I need to hit some config files as well? So to do my help work, I 'gt' to my open help file and enter:

:Dir

Boom! My working directory is now:

<app root>/config/help/topics/

I need to do some work on the config files, I enter:

:e.

Now I have the file explorer, hit '-' twice, open a config file and enter:

:Dir

Boom now I'm in the config directory.
I use this alias all the time. It really makes life more enjoyable.

I am Benedict Arnold

I really like Ditto when I'm stuck working on a Windows machine. It is a snappy little clipboard manager. It has some cool features like custom global shortcuts, groups, editing, plain text pasting. But it's a Windows application.
I recently was having troubles with Klipper - actually it was Plasma's 'integrated' clipboard manager - so I decided to look around and see what was out there for Nix.

I found CopyQ. It's cross platform which is very cool. So I gave it a try...

Goodbye Ditto.

I feel bad. We've had good times together. I would like to comfort you by saying it's me, not you. But it's you. You have been outshined.

CooyQ is not quite as fast as Ditto, but it UI is very powerful. It has global hotkeys, tabs, so clips can be organized etc. Tabs are like Dittos groups, but it's far easier to work with these in CopyQ. Navigating tabs is easy, editing clips is easy, it has plain text pasting like Ditto. And the UI can be customized so it can be as minimal as you want. All this in a little clipboard manager. - A cross platform clipboard manager at that.

I'm sorry Ditto, but I think we need to break up.

CopyQ Homepage.