There are lots of little blog posts containing advice about various one-line options you can do in Vim. This post falls into that category, but I’m hoping to do a more comprehensive view into one small subsystem of Vim’s configuration: automatic line wrapping.
When programming, automatic line wrapping can be a little obnoxious because even if a piece of code is hanging past the recommended 72/80 column width line, you probably don’t want to immediately break it; but if you’re writing a text document or an email message, that is specifically the behavior you want. By default, vim does no automatic line wrapping for you; turning it on is a question of being able to toggle it on and off when you want it.
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unattended-upgrades is a nifty little package that will go ahead and automatically install updates for you as they become enabled. No serious system administrator should use this (you are testing updates before pushing them to the servers, right?) but for many personal uses automatic updates are really what you want; if you run sudo aptitude full-upgrade and don’t read the changelog, you might as well turn on unattended upgrades. You can do this by adding the line APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1" to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic (thanks Ken!)
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I’ve come a long ways from complaining to the html5lib list that the Python version gratuitously used generators, making it hard to port to PHP. Having now drunk the laziness kool-aid in Haskell, I enjoy trying to make my code fit the generator idiom. While Python generators have notable downsides compared to infinite lazy lists (for example, forking them for multiple use is nontrivial), they’re pretty nice.
Unfortunately, the majority of code I see that expects to see lists isn’t robust enough to accept generators too, and it breaks my heart when I have to say list(generator). I’ll forgive you if you’re expecting O(1) accesses of arbitrary indexes in your internal code, but all too often I see code that only needs sequential access, only to botch it all up by calling len(). Duck typing won’t save you there.
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