Hey friends,

For my birthday, I received this envelope from my oldest:

Yep, now a proud resident of 40 Years City! (Don't worry, I won't let aging keep me down... it's too hard to get up again. 😂👴)

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Welp, I finally got around to finishing the Summer Purge of my editor setup.

One of the things I love about Vim and Neovim is the community. Nearly every one of my plugins is developed by a passionate (and quite brilliant) community.

However, sometimes people move on. Packer, the plugin manager I've used since I made the switch to a full Lua, is now in maintenance mode. Enter Lazy.nvim, a new manager with fine-grained lazy loading module control and a very nice interface! But it's normal usage means ...

...MULTIPLE FILES! 😱

You might be thinking... um, so what? Isn't that pretty much standard everywhere? You'd be right, but I've resisted splitting my vim config for a long time. I thought that if I started splitting my vim config into partials it'd start to balloon in complexity and length — that the abstraction would make it too easy to keep adding things and lose touch with what's actually going on in there. So even when I saw lots of configs of folks I respect start to do it, I waited.

But to REALLY clean is to take stock and figure out whether the things you have are still providing value. IN this case a sort of digital Konmari. If it's no longer providing value, we need to "thank them for their service – then let them go." My concern over splitting my config into multiple files was unfounded, in fact, this new method makes it EASIER to manage plugins by better colocation of initialization and setup. It was time to let the single-file mental construct go.

Along the way I also found solutions to small problems I've had for awhile: remembering which file is in which split, which of the hundreds of keystrokes did I bind that command to, chunky scrolling of loooooong lines — be looking for a follow-up post with the specifics!

Oh, and my startup time is down to 98.09ms 😎 (Was I profiling it before? No. Do I feel cool now for having a sub 100ms editor startup? Absolutely.)

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• An impressive demo of glitch effect transitions using both Three.js and shaders.
• Andrey Sitnik from EvilMartians talks about what they learned from creating PostCSS.
• Pipe operators are coming in PHP 8.5.
• Stank makes a counter component in pure HTML/CSS for funsies.
• Geoffrey Lit wonders if we should have more AI HUDs than AI Co-pilots, with practically prescient sources from 33 years ago!
• Chris Ferdinandi shows us how to find the index in a JS for loop.
• The 2025 JS13K competition has started!! I always love seeing the creativity that comes out of constraints. Check out last year's winners around the theme: Triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13...)

Other Stuff

• I feel this way about notebooks and art supplies: "Always buy the $200 (aka cheap) Yamaha". Better to USE it than to baby it and hide it away.
• Wouter Groeneveld talks about how he recognized a piece of software during a hospital stay and [was ashamed(https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/08/on-being-haunted-by-my-corporate-software-past/).
• A timely and mildly unnerving visual experiment of revealing ages.
• Just weird enough to be true (maybe?) the PIZZAINT tracks the delivery of pizza to the government as a pre-event indicator.
• I've always loved the boldness of linocuts, and these prints from Le Vilain are no exception.
• This site mimics the current sky at your location as a gradient. 🌞☁️
• So apparently there was an international competition run by a seemingly-real non-profit on the design of a generational spaceship?