spell checking and open source

I can’t explain it but there’s something terrific about open-source software. In a world dominated by greed & corporate monopolies, the existence of open-source software somewhat sheds light onto the battlefield. Also, I finally learned how to enable spell checking in Vim! It’s quite simple, really. You enter normal mode by pressing the ESC key, then “:”, & type “set spell”. If you need to specify the language (I think the default is en-US), then you type the following instead: set spelllang={insert language code, i.e. “en”}_{insert regional code, i.e. “us”}. I can finally use the more sophisticated words I know in the English language without having to embarrass myself, because spelling mistakes are just … really embarrassing.

Once you enable spell checking, you type “]s” to skip to the next misspelled word in clockwise fashion & “[s” to skip to the previous misspelled word in anti-clockwise fashion. Only practice will get you there to mastering these features of Vim. The way I remember which one brings me forward & which one brings me backward is that I see the direction of the boxy brackets. If it’s like “]s”, it looks like the s is being propelled forward by some rocket. If it’s like “[s”, it looks the s is propelled backward by the same rocket. I know it’s a silly way to remember, but well it works so I’ve no complaints. Once you go to a misspelled word in Vim, you can type “z=” for Vim to bring a panel of suggestions it thinks you might find helpful. Those are the only three commands I know for spell checking in Vim as of the moment. There are much more, but I believe these three suffice for me. I just need to navigate through misspelled words in both a clockwise & anti-clockwise fashion, & also be able to have a suggestion panel for the misspelled word. I still haven’t learned how to add a word to your personal dictionary in Vim, so there’s still much to learn! And God, it’s only spell checking. Vim is certainly a difficult tool to master, but it just feels so efficient. And it’s open-source, which I have a unconscious bias towards. Like I literally use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office because Microsoft Office is not open-source, & they don’t offer a Linux app, which is quite sad but makes sense. If Microsoft did make a Linux app for Microsoft Office, I’m sure some genius Linux system administrator would reverse engineer the whole app, & distribute it as a .deb or flatpak for the whole community. We do not speak of snaps. They are are something we don’t speak of, & something that I’ve to remove from my Ubuntu machine. It’s going to be a lot of work, but snaps are just not reliable; they can be very glitchy. I would’ve preferred if Canonical hadn’t created snaps. Hmm. I hope they’re not reading this.

More about open-source software: if humanity ever does reach the scale of an interstellar civilization, you know what’ll be running on those space ships? Not Windows because we can’t have the system reboot itself when it’s light-years away from Microsoft headquarters; I mean could there even be a wi-fi connection then? Not Mac too because Apple’s going to impose a heavy tax for governments to use their software. It’s going to be Linux, because you can literally do anything with Linux. Open-source software has the capability to transcend lifetimes, or at least that’s what I think. It’s also free & people (like myself) can be very cheap. And then there’s the thing about security. A basement-dwelling seventeen-year-old teenager could think of a solution to a piece of code that a corporate employee could spend entire years on in only a day or two. Do not underestimate people. Allowing anyone to contribute is why open-source software is so resilient to changes in time. Anyways, this is three paragraphs, so I’ll wrap it up for this week.