Vim’s spellchecker

I’ve used the Vim editor for so long yet never used its spellcheck feature. Tonight while typing a journal entry I wanted to do a spellcheck and found out how easy it is: just type :set spell

Here’s an excellent page with everything about Vim’s spellcheck feature:

webdesign10.com: How to Use Vim’s Spellchecker

The other day I was going through some old backup directories looking for a script I had written when I found a directory of all these scripts I had created and once used more often. One of the scripts was to create a new journal entry with Vim in my journal text document. The script simply opens the document and inserts the current date and time.

It made me look for where the most recent backup copy of the journal was. I actually lost track of it. I had stopped using it in favor of a somewhat similar calendar document I was using – with similar convenient script. At the time it had seemed like overkill to make entries in both the journal and the calendar documents.

Then later I started putting the most salient things into my Mozilla Lightning calendar and also bailed on the text calendar. In all these different backup directories I have I found different versions of both the journal and calendar text documents. I think I found the most recent version of both.

I’m going to start using at least one of them again. It may seem like there’s no purpose, but I feel like there is a value in writing a journal. Given the intensity of things I’ve experienced in recent times and all that is going on, I think it is even more so.

The journal is like a little mini check-in and mini check-ins are very helpful.

Its also insightful to read entries from years ago.

FWIW here’s my little journal script which I invoke in a Cygwin64 BASH shell (using Console2) by typing journal
——————————————————————–
#!/bin/bash -e

JOURNAL=”$HOME/Dropbox/journal/journal3.txt”
DATE=`date +’%A %e %B %Y %R %Z’`

printf “\n\n\n$DATE\n\n” >> $JOURNAL

vim + $JOURNAL +
——————————————————————————-

It goes to the end of the document and inserts a date like

Saturday 25 January 2014 01:33 PST

The calendar script, invoked by typing cal, is very similar, only the inserted date is like:

Sat 2014.01.25