Status update January 2020

For the past month I’ve been flexing my writing muscle.

At the turn of the year I got the idea of putting a SWAT4 article series together. SWAT4 turns 15 years old in October this year so writing about it seemed like a good way to celebrate one of my favorite game series.

I started to play SWAT4 on the day it was released and eventually played it some 2000 hours in total. I only focused on multiplayer co-op — I skipped the single-player and other game modes completely.

The concept of the article series is to first introduce SWAT4 as a game, delve into close-quarters combat tactics and then finally give an overview of some of the missions. The draft for the first article is almost written, weighting about 2500 words.

Compared to my normal tool set writing an article, that is vim, I decided to use the more archaic nvi editor. There’s an annoying syntax highlighting issue in the current Homebrew version of vim that messes up the coloring of italic and bolded text. nvi doesn’t have such problems.

nvi is a surprisingly tolerable editor. The only issue I have is the different behavior of the backspace key. In vim you can use the backspace key in insert mode to delete any previous typed character while in nvi it’s only possible to erase characters typed in the current insert mode session.

My current nvi editor configuration is as follows: https://git.sr.ht/~artoj/dotfiles/tree/master/exrc

In short, I’m using fmt and ispell in lieu of the built-in options that exist in vim. Other maps make nvi behave more like vim. nvi requires the use of control characters in the configuration which is why I omitted the configuration preview.

That’s all I have for this month. See you in the next one!