Debugging Lua in Neovim

  Saturday, June 10, 2023 » Neovim Lua

In this post I want to show you how you can debug Lua scripts with Neovim and nvim-dap. Both regular Lua, but also Lua that uses Neovim as Lua interpreter. The latter is interesting if you want to debug Neovim plugin test cases written using busted

Debugging Neovim with Neovim and nvim-dap

  Friday, February 17, 2023 » Neovim

Recently a change got merged in Neovim that decoupled its TUI from the main process. A side effect of the change is that debugging it became a bit more troublesome. It now forks itself and you end up with two processes. Depending on what you want to debug you need to attach to that second process.

I thought this might be an interesting use-case for more advanced features of nvim-dap. This post explores using it to automate attaching to the second process.

Even if you’ll never debug Neovim you may find this interesting as it could give you some ideas on what you can do with a hackable debugger.

This post uses nvim-dap features of the upcoming 0.5 release. If you’re on 0.4 you’ll have to switch to the development branch. (If you are from the future, use 0.5+)

Can you write a CLI using Java?

  Saturday, May 14, 2022

A recent conversation got me curious about how people feel about writing command line applications in Java.

I knew that Java for many isn’t the first choice when thinking of building a CLI, but I was curious if people consider it an option at all. I started a poll on Twitter. Only 19 people participated, but the outcome was quite clear:

Java is a good choice to write command line applications

Option Votes
Agree 5.3%
Disagree 68.4%
No way, are you crazy 26.3%

If you asked me several years ago I’d have had a similar reaction, but in 2022 I’m not so sure anymore.

Reading science papers on a Remarkable

  Thursday, January 27, 2022

A while ago I damaged my old tablet and got a Remarkable 2 as replacement. One of the use-cases for my old tablet was reading science papers. The remarkable can read PDFs and EPUB files and with a 10.3” screen it’s one of the larger eink devices on the market.

Computer science papers often use a 2-column layout, small font and large margins. It’s possible to read, but despite the screen size it wasn’t the most pleasant experience. It would be more convenient if we could re-arrange and re-flow the text.

Turns out we can.