What's it all about, Alfie?

Yesterday I noticed that Textual 7 was removed from the App Store, and they took it Standalone with a separate license from the authors. I have the App Store version, so I asked - in Textual 🙂 - what the process was for upgrading to the Standalone version.

While I waited for an answer, I kept looking on the company website, and sure enough, they had a set of instructions for how to get a license from an App Store version. So this morning, I followed those instructions, and now have the latest version of Textual 7 with a new Standalone license from the authors.

I get the reason they left the App Store... the license only costs $10, so it's not like they make a ton of money on the app... so it makes sense to try and keep what they get. And I run it all the time, so it's not like I wouldn't have paid $10 for a new license, if that's what was needed. But this was really nice of them to offer a path.

I have been trying to set Vim settings, specific for text files, in my .vimrc for the longest of time, and I really wanted to get this figured out this morning. So here we go.

It's all about the autocmd, or au, command, and you can set it up pretty easily. What I had in the past was:

  autocmd FileType md
  \    set ai sw=2 sts=2 et
  autocmd FileType txt
  \    set ai sw=2 sts=2 et

where, in these two examples, I'm trying to set the autoindent to ON, the shiftwidth to 2, the softtabstop to 2 and expandtab to ON. And it wasn't working for files like goof.txt and for the life of me I could not figure this out.

And then it hit me - I had a FileType of javascript in the file, what if Vim needed to have text for the FileType? So let's try:

  autocmd FileType markdown
  \    set ai sw=2 sts=2 et
  autocmd FileType text
  \    set ai sw=2 sts=2 et

And all of a sudden, it worked like a charm. I also tried markdown using the same reasoning. I guess that goes to show me that Vim is interpreting the file extension, and not literally using it as the FileType. Smart. Appreciated.

I noticed that Postgres 16 was updated in Homebrew, so I took the time to upgrade the installation on my MacBook Pro, and it was remarkably easy. Because it was a simple "dot" upgrade, the installer did all the heavy lifting:

 $ brew upgrade postgresql@16

and then when it was done, simply restart the service with:

 $ brew services restart postgresql@16

And that was it. Everything is up and running just fine. What a treat. 🙂

This is the second "dot" upgrade I've done with Postgres 16 and Homebrew, and I just can't get over how clean and simple it is. I've checked all the databases, and they are good, and everything is fine.

I have been looking at starting some projects in Clojure for work, and I thought it would be good for me to get the latest JDK 17 from Homebrew and Temurin. As it turns out, the latest for JDK 17 is now JDK 17.0.4, and since I had a slightly older version of that version, and the Homebrew name changed, I had to:

  $ brew tap homebrew/cask

and then to actually update it:

  $ brew install --cask temurin@17

When I checked:

  $ java -version
  openjdk version "17.0.14" 2025-01-21
  OpenJDK Runtime Environment Temurin-17.0.14+7 (build 17.0.14+7)
  OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Temurin-17.0.14+7 (build 17.0.14+7, mixed mode, sharing)

which is exactly what I was hoping for.

As an interesting note, the re-tapping of the cask updated the name of temurin11 to temurin@11, and I updated JDK 11 as well - why not? It's at 11.0.26, and I might use it... you never know.

Now I'm up-to-date with both versions, and I can easily switch from one to the other with the shell function I wrote. Excellent! 🙂