Chish

How I dropped LazyVim and wrote my own configuration from scratch

Unknown — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The hardest part of adopting Neovim isn't learning modal editing or deciphering Lua-- it's the overwhelming paralysis of choice. When three different plugins seemingly do the exact same job, and every forum thread argues passionately for a different one, it is absurdly easy to spiral into analysis paralysis.

To escape that loop and just get back to writing code, I took the shortcut everyone recommends: I installed LazyVim.

Escaping AI Tutorial Hell and Learning to Actually Think in Code

Unknown — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two friends and I are building a regex parser and interactive TUI in Go for Hack Club-- basically regex101, but running directly inside the terminal using Bubble Tea.

One took the engine (lexer, parser, NFA matcher), the second built the bridge between the two, and I took the TUI.

Early in the project, I caught myself falling into a dangerous habit that almost every junior dev is struggling with right now. I stopped it before it ruined my learning, broke the crutch, and forced myself to build the core architecture from first principles.

Fixing Sphinx's Hyphen-Eating Search

Unknown — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So Sphinx's search was doing this annoying thing where searching for -v or --force just... returned nothing. Even in docs that literally have those exact flags written out.

### The Mystery: Python Indexer vs JavaScript Search

My first instinct was to go poke the JS search code since, well, that's what actually runs the query right. But that's only treating the symptom lol, by the time a query even reaches the JS side, the index has ALREADY lost the hyphens. Turns out the Python indexer was stripping leading hyphens before terms even got stored. So -v was being indexed as just v, and no amount of JS fixing was ever gonna find that.

### Flags vs Compound Words

Real fix had to happen on the Python side, regex change. The annoying part was telling apart something like -v (a flag, keep the hyphen) from the hyphen inside extra-curricular (a compound word, don't treat it special). Those two cases look kinda similar but need totally different handling...

This is what led me to negative lookbehind, which I'd genuinely never used before. (?<!pattern) basically checks "hey is this pattern NOT sitting right before me" without actually consuming any characters. Zero width check, so it doesn't eat part of what you're trying to match.

### The Regex Fix

Ended up with this:

(?<!\w)-{1,2}\w[\w-]*|\w+

Reading it out... match one or two hyphens followed by a word character (and then whatever word/hyphen stuff after), BUT only if there's not already a word character sitting right before those hyphens. That's what kicks out the extra-curricular case while still letting -v and --force through clean. The |\w+ at the end is just... normal word matching for everything that isn't hyphen-flag-shaped.

PR's up against Sphinx now. Fingers crossed for review lol.