I am the type of person who can sit down at their computer to "quickly test something" after seeing a YouTube video, and then 4 hours later, realized they have spiraled into madness, with 17 docs pages open and a new repo with 12 commits.

So this time, instead of getting up from my computer, I thought I should make a little pomodoro timer to keep me in check. I figured, as with all projects, the first thing to do is to set myself some constraints, to stop the scope creeping more and more.

The rules

• a neovim plugin
• unobtrusive
• allow some customization

Each of these things came with their own set of problems, the first of which, how the hell do I make a Neovim plugin? I got digging, and found a lot of help in watching TJ De Vries' "Neovim Plugin from Scratch" series. These videos helped me get a grip on how to interface with Neovim, but I still had more digging to do to learn how to get my ideas into lua.

The concept was fairly simple. I wanted a little pop-up in the corner that showed the timer, maybe a color, and a little line for quirky quotes to remind me to focus.

Now I just needed to find out:

• how do I make a floating window in neovim
• how do I make a timer in lua
• how do I set lines in a buffer
• how do I customize highlighting in a buffer
• how do I persist state
• how do I pass custom options to a plugin

More digging to be had, and I found answers to a lot of my questions. After noodling with it and tweaking the ideas, I got to a point where I can now say I have a v1.0.

Even after only being half done, I have found myself using it a lot, to stop me getting completely tunnel visioned with what I am working on. Hell, I am using it right now to write this, because I know I should probably get off the couch and get into bed.

You can already use it, if you want. All the information is in the readme on the GitHub page.