2019 Retrospective

Here I am again, writing up this year’s retrospective on the last day of the year no less.

As per usual, let’s kick this off by sharing the mandatory “last year in commits” chart generated by GitHub.

Async Totem

Async Totem is a lean and mean async command runner for Vim 8 and later.

The reasons for me writing this plugin are two fold. First, I thought that it was about time for me to check out the async job support in Vim 8, and second I wanted to write a simple plugin leveraging it.

With that said, what better plugin to write than an async command runner?

Also, it’s worth noting that it’s 125 lines of vimscript (including the comments).

What was my general impression? It’s perfectly usable and just like all the extra features added on the top of Vim over the years, it does one thing only and it does it well, nothing else to comment, really!

Sobinka

I mentioned Sobinka, the general purpose 2D immediate mode game engine last year; while I still didn’t release it to the general public yet, did manage to figure out and even freeze some of the existing user (developer) facing API.

There’s still some discovery and experimentation to be done when it comes to nailing down the initial API that would be included for the v1.0.0 release, however, enough of it has been defined where I can start using it to sketch out some of the game ideas that I’ve been toying around with lately.

My plan is to wrap it up and release it sometime next year, but not before, I have at least one game prototype of my own up and running, which I can use to profile things in more or less real life scenarios.

I know that I said this last year, but I’ll attempt to blog about it in 2020, and go into some of the technical and architectural decisions I’ve taken while designing it. Nothing super duper revolutionary, but I do think that there are a couple of things lurking there that worth talking about.

13kjsgames

I made an attempt at coming up with something for the 13kjsgames competition (or game jam if you will), but sadly, I couldn’t finish my entry in time, and later I just put the project into the back burner for now.

Nevertheless, let me share a small gif showcasing the project.

.dotfiles

This year, I also simplified a lot of my dotfiles and colorschemes, as well as removed some Vim plugins that I wasn’t really getting all that much out of at the end of the day. I like to do this from time to time and try to get by with the bare minimum, without sacrificing customizability or flexibility.

As far as fonts are concerned, I am still rolling with the excellent IBM Plex Mono. If you are looking for a fresh and new monospaced font for the New Year, you should most definitely check it out!

End

Until next time, as server said, END OF LINE.