I typically like to do development work on my local machine. Locally I’ve got all my favorite tools, scripts, and aliases along with custom mappings for my editor. Local development is much more pleasant than SSH’ing into a server and running commands. Without all my custom tools and configurations the environment feels foreign to me. Because of this I generally try to avoid solutions to development problems that involve a virtual machine. Even though the VM is running on my laptop it’s really not that much easier to develop on than a regular server.

I recently have been trying to automate many of the smaller tasks that I need to perform when publishing a blog post. One those tasks is submitting my new sitemap to the various search engines and blogging services. Right now I either do it manually or wait until the search engines crawl my site again.

Many Vim users don’t realize that their shell offers a Vi mode, but both Zshell and Bash do. I’ve been a big fan of Vim for many years now and use it exclusively for all editing work I do. In addition to using Vim for code I also write all my blog post in Vim with vim-pencil and goyo.vim. I only recently decided to switch to Vi mode in my Zsh and Bash shells. While I was happy to move away from Emacs mode, which is the default in Zsh and Bash, I was disappointed with the key mappings present in Zsh’s Vi mode. Many of the features I’d come to love from Zsh’s Emacs mode were gone. After some tinkering and reading several blog posts (links at the bottom of the page) I figured out how to add these features back into Vi mode.