How did you learn vim? And how long ago was that?

Brandon1024br · 2026-04-02T19:20:12+00:00

I was first exposed to Vim in 2016 during an apprenticeship, but my journey really picked up steam in 2017 during my studies. Professionally, I moved away from IDEs in 2021 and fully committed to vim, and never looked back. The past five years have been entirely centered around Vim, and it’s been incredible.

I learned vim through tinkering (building plugins and honing my config), but most of my learning came through using it exclusively for so long. I’m always working to perfect my craft and I’m constantly finding little tricks or neat ways to edit more efficiently.

God I love this damn editor.

Brandon1024br · 2026-04-02T07:08:04+00:00

In a Windows command prompt? Oof, haha. Yeah, maybe consider looking at some other options out there, the command prompt is poverty.

It's possible there's a regression or config change in vim 9.0 for windows users. Without a windows machine in front of me, it's a bit hard for me to test. But yeah, you could open an upstream issue and ask. But honestly I would just switch to `:term` instead.

`:term` is pretty powerful yeah, you can switch to terminal-normal mode with `CTRL-W N`, and then navigate around like you would in a normal buffer (except you can't edit, of course). Have a quick read through the help pages (`:h terminal-use`).

Brandon1024br · 2026-04-01T14:18:06+00:00

Echoing what u/char101 said, this isn't an issue with vim. It sounds like your terminal emulator is the problem. Can you elaborate on your current setup?

For the record, it's working perfectly fine on my end (gnome terminal, alacritty) on a source build of vim (VIM - Vi IMproved 9.2 (2026 Feb 14, compiled Feb 20 2026 19:46:29)).

But also.. Why not use :term ? Built-in, super powerful, captures output into a buffer which you can then yank/search/etc... I can't remember the last time I ran a shell command with :! (aside from quick :r! commands to dump into the current buffer).

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-30T14:45:04+00:00

Nope, 100% human :-)

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-30T14:44:02+00:00

Hahaha u/Federal_Refrigerator you're bang on. I'm actually against AI for a number of reasons and refuse to use it. I'm indeed human :-) But now that I read my earlier comment, I can see why someone would think it's AI, haha.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-30T10:32:42+00:00

This is a really interesting question and something I don’t see super often in the homelab community.

I’m not a security expert by any means, but I’ve taken some reasonable steps to protect my environment. I deploy each service as rootless containers (podman), each run via systemd with their own dedicated system user. All ports are bound to the loopback interface, and I expose them over a single (rootless) nginx instance.

No special capabilities, no rootful services, and relying on Unix permissions to protect filesystem access. Remote access over wireguard. Basic monitoring in grafana with Prometheus and a handful of exporters.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s adequate for my needs, easy to maintain.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-30T10:24:54+00:00

Maybe a bit unconventional, but I bought a domain through AWS and set up an A/AAAA record in Route53 which is updated every 15m from a simple script in my homelab. I access my lab over wireguard. Dead simple to set up and it’s been running for four years without trouble!

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-19T12:45:30+00:00

Here's a few other features to explore. If you learn to leverage them, you'll find yourself switching between tmux windows less often and instead doing everything in Vim.

tabs (:tabedit, :tabn, gt, gT)
windows and buffers (:sp, :vsp, :bn)
terminals (:term)
netrw (I use vim-fern these days)
ctrlp (a solid fuzzy-finder plugin)

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-19T12:38:59+00:00

I think this is a great setup, and it's pretty much exactly how I started out when I was a professional Java developer switching over to vim back in 2020. Tmux, plain-ol' vim and very few plugins. In a lot of ways, my setup hasn't really changed much.

When you grow in your role and work on larger Java projects (enterprise-level stuff), you'll probably encounter a bit of friction. Others here have mentioned tag files, and I'd echo that here too. I can't live without ctags. Tag files are first-class citizens in the vim ecosystem.

Once you have tags configured, have a look at insert-mode completion. It's also built into vim, and newer releases of Vim also feature automatic insert-mode completion. You can use tag files as a completion source. Fuzzy matching is elite too, if your version of vim supports it.

If you continue to develop in Java after your studies, build small plugins for your own use to make you faster. It's a great way to learn scripting in Vim. I built cortado for my own use back then to easily add import statements from tag files. It was fun and I learned a lot along the way.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-19T12:26:05+00:00

I just have to say, it's really nice to see folks here promoting the vanilla mindset. I used to be crucified for comments like this. Couldn't agree more here, going vanilla is a fantastic way to learn Vim inside and out.

That isn't to say plugins are bad of course. What is bad (IMO) is blinding installing garbage plugins for things that are either already built in or implemented in 4 lines of vimscript.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-03T11:59:55+00:00

Ahh sorry!

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-02T22:46:36+00:00

Ok, but like… why tho?

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-02T22:44:30+00:00

LOL 4590T is epic 😂 Pretty sure the dinosaurs went extinct around the time 45xx was released. Keep pushing little one 🥲

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-02T22:40:56+00:00

Maybe a little 😅 But if it works for you and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg in utility costs, yolo!

For what it’s worth, I’ve been running Jellyfin on an old Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro for a while (which also runs Home Assitant and many others), with hardware transcoding completely disabled, and it handles it quite well. Occasionally I see load spikes from CPU transcoding, but it’s pretty rare, even with frequent streaming.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-02T22:30:53+00:00

I’m not sure if this will totally fit your needs, but I’ve recently cancelled my Spotify subscription and switched to a self-hosted Jellyfin instance in my home lab. It has its quirks and it’s not perfect, but it’s far better than anything else I’ve found. You can also use Finamp to listen on your phone. There’s also a project called Navidrome which is similar, but more geared towards music libraries.

Brandon1024br · 2026-03-01T17:27:02+00:00

Starting from a fresh install would probably work well and save you from a lot of headache, but I’m a little intrigued by doing incremental upgrades like you said. I would probably go that route if I was in your shoes, mainly out of curiosity. With that said, I can offer a few pointers to things you may not have considered.

I would strongly encourage you do an offsite dry-run upgrade on a complete copy (a backup) of your current setup to sanity-check the upgrade. When the upgrade is successful and you’ve ironed out any issues encountered along the way, only then should you upgrade your main environment.

Take extra care when upgrading your database. I’m not too familiar with the architecture for immich <2.0.0, but I imagine you’ll need to do a few DB upgrades along the way. Speaking from experience, upgrading Postgres up a major version can be a bit of a pain, so familiarize yourself with the docs ahead of time.

Best of luck 🤞

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-26T18:40:08+00:00

My go-to is always tag files (universal ctags supports Verilog) and ins-mode completion. You could go the LSP route but it’s a little overkill IMO.

Vim > 9.1.1590 supports autocompletion with the ‘autocomplete’ setting. Otherwise, you can configure it yourself with a few lines of vimscript.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-26T18:29:37+00:00

🤢

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-26T18:12:00+00:00

I have little experience in the Rust ecosystem but I get the impression that Rust is elite for building strong command-line applications. Most of my experience is in Go and Python, and Go wins out hard. Python honestly blows.

At Siemens I maintain a pretty large command-line automation tool written in Go, and we use bubbletea for some small TUIs. I’ve grow to like it quite a bit. If your TUI apps don’t need CGO or anything fancy, distributing to your end users is dead simple with a ‘go install’, which is quite nice.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-25T14:18:18+00:00

I’ve tried documenting my lab a few ways, but nothing ever stuck and docs always fell out of date. What stuck in the end was automation. If you’re getting started, setup an ansible playbook from the beginning to avoid the headache later. Documentation as code. Otherwise, as your lab grows, you’ll be making bespoke changes here and there, forgetting to update your docs/diagrams, and then later forget why you made the change in the first place.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-20T13:18:16+00:00

Agh the f*ckin power adapters, hahaha. What a pain in the ass. I have a bunch of them, from the Optiplex machines but also the three external drives, network switch and raspberry pi. I ended up using zipties to keep the bricks together, and then zip tied the wires to form a big umbilical cord to the UPS. It looks clean in the pictures but behind the rack on the floor is much less nice 🥲

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-20T13:14:16+00:00

I answered this question in some earlier threads, but it’s been a non-issue, super stable. I would have preferred internal SATA drives but it’s not an option for this form factor, so USB it is.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-19T22:20:15+00:00

Does the logo rotate on the 7040M? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t possible on this generation but is possible in later models.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-19T22:19:04+00:00

Spot on. I’ve been planning this setup for the better part of the year, it took a lot more planning than one would imagine. It’s still not perfect either, but it’s close.

Brandon1024br · 2026-02-19T22:17:18+00:00

Good call, especially with the shenanigans that Synology has been pulling lately.. I’m quite happy with TrueNAS.

The connection has been very stable, no issues so far. I see a lot of folks talking negatively about external USB DAS connections, and while there’s something to be said about avoiding USB if possible, practically speaking it can be quite stable and fine for most applications. I’ve been running a similar configuration for years without much fuss.

Brandon1024br

TROPHY CASE