## squirrel ##

a small squirrel came up to my  office door--which is the door to our
back yard--yesterday morning and looked in the through the screen and
just kind of idled there for a little bit.

Then the  power went  out for a  couple hours. My  laptop had  a full
charge, so I grabbed my cell  phone to tether some internet, and went
and sat outside under the oak  tree and a squirrel--I like to imagine
it was the same one--chattered and barked at me the whole time.

Social little guy. Made me wonder  whether the previous owner fed the
squirrels or something.


                             ## nano ##

Had a  small Text Editor  Wars convo  on #tildetown yesterday.  I had
just discovered  that my new  pinebook pro shipped without  vi/vim or
emacs, and seemed to only have nano as a text editor. (I didn't think
to  check if  it had  something  like joe,  which I  only know  about
because of town.)

So I had just made the bold claim that nano is a garbage text editor,
no better than  notepad.exe, which is something that  I have believed
for a long time. Several townies jumped in to say that they use nano,
and even use nano exclusively under certain situations.

~twee pointed out that nano can record and play back macros, which is
something I  never knew before.  That is an advanced  editor feature,
and  ~twee successfully  changed a  long held  belief of  mine. I  no
longer  think that  nano  is  a worthless  text  editor  on par  with
notepad.exe.

I now  think that it  is a decent,  feature-light kind of  editor for
people who  don't want to  bother learning vim  or if the  don't like
modal editing, or if they don't want to bother with emacs.


                     ## justified text in vim ##

vim tricks: I have long admired how people on gopher make beautifully
aligned and formatted text, and I  couldn't really find a good way to
create that effect myself. ~cat  famously formats theirs all by hand!
I finally came across a couple recommendations for `par` and it ended
up being  just the thing!  You can pipe  text through it  with, e.g.,
`par -w69j` to justify paragraphs and it turns out super great!

Then you  can have vim  use par to  format paragraphs by  adding this
line to your vimrc:

```
set formatprg=par\ -w69j
```

Then you  can use the `gq`  command to format your  paragraphs in vim
like a dream!