Vim for robotics
Mtende Kuyokwa
27 April 2025
~ Naval
Over the past week I was working on a robot for a competition. The microcontroller I was using was a Raspberry Pi 3. This is probably the most faith testing microcontroller of all time.
Previously, the only microcontroller I had worked with was an Arduino nothing major just some light blinking of lights type of projects in class. Outside class, I didn't even play with Arduino so my microcontroller knowledge was shaky.
Spoiler alert, I ended up using the Arduino for the robot I was building for the competition because the pi3 died on me.
Neovim not vim
After sudo upgrading the piOS, I installed Neovim even though vim was avalaible. I did this for the pettiest reason, neovim has a change in cursor shape for insert and normal mode. I am a simple man and this is all I wanted.I wanted to install kickstart.nvim but It is a bulky config for the pi and I wanted to keep my setup as minimal as possible. This led to me using neovim in its vanilla form. One of my todos might be to build a special Raspberry pi neovim config that is light. It will be some sort of xfce of neovim distros/enviroments
ssh as ssshhh
I learnt some cool things about ssh-ing into computers. It was fun when I set it up and had to use it with Windows. I was using a Windows computer in its vanilla form, no wsl, and managed to ssh in my pi3.Having installed neovim, I used it as the editor in the terminal/cmd and it was weird how I could not use my mouse to switch between my terminal-windows. Luckily, my so not-almighty brain remembered about the CTRL-W trick. I could also resize my terminal-windows with a mouse.
vanilla vim
This windows-vim experience made me realise that I could use Vim without any plugins and still be OK. In late March and early April, I read the Vim user manual. This paid a thousandfold when I was using nvim from a Raspberry Pi SSH port. I managed to get window splitting in Windows cmd and it was the coolest thing.It felt weird writing Python code without LSP support though. It was like living in the caveman days.
My team didn't win but that is OK-- I had a chance to use a Raspberry pi for the first time with vim in the mix, Life doesn't get cooler than that.