Code::Stats plugins for Zsh and Vim

2018-04-05 / 4 mins read

To get this blog started, I'm writing about some code I've put online. The most interesting are probably the two Code::Stats plugins I've created.

Code::Stats is a free service for collecting stats about writing code. It's a for-fun side project of a colleague. Basically the server exposes an API that receives character counts per language along with a timestamp. The data is gathered by editor plugins.

Zsh plugin for Code::Stats

I thought it would be fun to see how much I type in the terminal, so I created a Zsh plugin for that. It wraps some Zsh widgets to be able to capture keystrokes and sends them using a background curl process after any process completes or the shell exits, throttled down to at most once every ten seconds.

The plugin reports Code::Stats XP as language Terminal (Zsh).

Vim plugin for Code::Stats

After I realized it's not too hard to write a plugin and knowing there was some demand for a Vim plugin, I asked the local Vim guru at work for some help to get started.

The Vim plugin was a bit difficult to get working realiably as I wanted to support all the platforms I humanly could:

Both Vim and NeoVim
As old Vim versions as possible (The limiting factor became support for the InsertCharPre event, needed for counting keystrokes: Vim 7.3.196)
All operating systems that could conceivably work (looking at you, Windows)
Both Python 2 and Python 3

Plain Vimscript couldn't make HTTP requests so it was obvious a script language was needed, and probably Python has the broadest coverage of installations. I also wouldn't rely on async support as that would rule Vim 7.x out, so I needed to handle asynchonous behaviour by creating a background worker process using Python multiprocessing. Eventually I got the obvious glitches ironed out and made a release.

Afterwards I sprinkled some unit tests for the Python code and some end-to-end tests that run a mock server and a Vim instance. The end-to-end tests were surprisingly difficult to get working properly. I set up Gitlab CI for the tests and even added (Python) coverage reporting so I get nice icons like this: Code coverage status icon for code-stats-vim

Below is an animation I created for the Gitlab page. It's not perfect by any means but it should convey the idea.

Animation of code-stats-vim

My thoughts

The plugins were a lot of fun to write, and I had to learn a lot of new stuff for both:

Zsh specifics. I usually prefer POSIX-compatible shell scripts, but that wouldn't be idiomatic or good for performance.
Quality control for a shell script. Basically ShellCheck running in Gitlab CI---maybe I should consider unit testing.
VimL (and Python integration).
Robust multiprocessing. Distributed systems are difficult to get right.
Releasing software for other people to use. That means prioritizing usability both at install and run time, avoiding all the corner-case glitches that won't happen on my machine, writing good READMEs etc.

+++

Both plugins are under the Code::Stats organization on Gitlab. Both have users beside myself (yay!).

https://gitlab.com/code-stats/code-stats-zsh
https://gitlab.com/code-stats/code-stats-vim

I also worked a bit on the Code::Stats core before creating these plugins. I did like Elixir and Phoenix, but I currently prefer to spend my spare time outside web development.