Introduction

Creating markdown tables in Vim is not very intuitive. Out of the box Vim does not have the capability of formatting markdown tables. And manually keeping them formatted is no less than a tedious job. For reasons like these, I have for years avoided using tables in markdown. But a good thing about Vim is that it’s very easy to customize it and add new functionalities. Recently I spent some time to make the task of creating and keeping markdown tables formatted a little easier in Vim.

Introduction

After tinkering with it for a while now I finally have got a very much functional global menu working on my Xfce4 desktop running on Debian 10. I will list down the steps I followed to get the global menu configured on my Debian Xfce box in this post.

Global menu vs Local menu

For those of you who might be wondering what a global menu is, it is a way of displaying the application menus on the top of the screen like the way MacOS does. By default the Xfce4 desktop displays the menus right below the Window title bar separately in each Window.

Introduction

I primarily take notes in vim in markdown format. The upside is that editing in vim is a pleasure. But one downside of this approach is that my notes often contain images and rich texts (as opposed to plain texts) and vim out of the box is not a good tool to view anything that is more than just text. In this post, I discuss about how you can easily preview your markdown notes in your browser directly from your vim editor with the help of a small vim script and an utility called pandoc in just a couple of keystroke. All without a fancy external vim plugin.

Introduction

Connecting to an IRC room may not be a difficult task but if you communicate with a group of members connecting from different locations across the globe and are in different timezones and if you don’t want to miss out messages from them while you are offline, you may find yourself in a tricky situation. In this post I am going to share the easiest and the most cost-effective way to always stay connected on IRC using Matrix.

Introduction

Running Apache Kafka with Docker can be harder than it should be. Or perhaps it’s easy once you know what exactly you need to do. In this post, I’m going to discuss about how I run Kafka in Docker.

What is Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed real-time event streaming and ingestion platform that is capable of handling very large volume of data. With the rise in the Microservices architecture in recent years, Kafka has gained a lot of popularity.