The iTerm2 terminal includes a transparency feature; enable it in settings:
Once enabled, you can toggle transparency on and off with CMD + u.
Hereās my transparent iTerm, with a very important Wikipedia page below.
Today I learned that GitHub has allows you to insert a one-line suggestion while conducting a pull request review. Click on the button circled in red, and youāll get a suggestion fenced code block, as shown.
Inside the code block is the current code; replace it with your proposed change. GitHub will present your suggestion in a nice diff format.
When the pull requester views your suggestion, they can accept the change with one click. Efficient!
Multiple-lines are not yet supported, according to this GitHub blog post it is a frequently requested feature.
h/t Jed and Raelyn
On a big project, Pivotal Tracker contains a wealth of data. Letās use it!
Today I filtered all the stories assigned to my teammate with the owner keyword:
owner, owned_by
owner: āObi Wan Kenobiā
Search using the full name, initials, the username, user id or part of the userās name.
This filtered out hundreds of stories, leaving the four in progress that I care about.
Hereās the official advanced search guide. Try a new keyword today!
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/articles/advanced_search/
Today I discovered AlternativeTo, which provides ācrowdsourced software recommendationsā. Itās available here:
https://alternativeto.net/
With this resource you can find alternatives to websites, tools, operating systems, and more, and learn about each alternative you find.
For reference, I checked out the results for open source alternatives to Ruby. The list includes no-brainers like Python, JavaScript, and Java, but also Go, C, and Lua. If I were a CTO who didnāt know Ruby and needed to quickly understand its position in the ecosystem, this would be a pretty useful starting point.
Ok, you can kill a session in Tmux from the command line with tmux kill-session -t <session-name>. Did you know you can add a flag to kill every session other than your target? Hereās that command.
$ tmux kill-session -a -t <session-name>
$ tmux kill-session -at <session-name> # short versionAll sessions but the target will die. This is my āclear the deskā operation when I come back to my computer after some time away and want to shut down a bunch of random servers and processes.
Git log format strings are endlessly interesting to me. There are so many different ways to display the data.
Today I learned a new one, %cr. This formats your commit from the committer date, relative to now. After pulling from the remote, use it like this to see how long ago the latest commmit was committed:
$ git log -1 --format=%cr
8 hours agoI use this command when surveying a Github organization, or an old computer with lots of dusty projects laying around.
Recent versions of Firefox (Iām on 67.0.1) have built-in tools to explore JSON.
Hereās a screenshot of a JSON file from the React Native docs, viewed in Firefox:
We get syntax highlighting, the ability to save, copy, expand, or collapse the JSON, right in the browser, with no extra plugins or tools required. Another great Firefox feature!
Markdown parsers have a neat feature: a list of any numbers tends to be turned into an ordered lists.
I write:
99. First thing (?)
1. Second thing (??)
50. Third thing (??)
1. Fourth thing (????)And TILās markdown parser (Earmark) produces this as HTML:
Pretty cool! Sometimes I want to do my own thing, though. This Stack Overflow question elicits a bunch of techniques; the kind I learned today and used with success is:
99\. First thing (?)
1\. Second thing (??)
50\. Third thing (??)
1\. Fourth thing (????)Escape the pattern; break the system! This perserved my unordered numbering. Now, I may have other problems, like losing automatic ol and li tags, but the hack works.
When using the find command, consider the -iname flag. It works like -name:
True if the last component of the pathname being examined matches pattern.But with case insensitivity:
-iname pattern
Like -name, but the match is case insensitive.Hereās a sample command, which will match utils.js and Utils.js.
$ find . -iname Utils.jsSee man find for more information. h/t Raelyn.
In a bunch of Mac programs I tested today (Numbers, Keynote, Messages) the hotkey for the Preferences menu is ā + ,. It seems to be a convention, even carried over to App Store apps like Slack.
Check it out on your favorite Mac program and enjoy that mouse-free life.
git pull --depth works on an existing repo to set the depth of references retrieved. To quote the --depth docs:
Limit fetching to the specified number of commits from the tip of each remote branch history.
So, what happens when you run this? Hereās me experimenting with the Elixir repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
$ cd elixir
$ git log --oneline | wc -l
15670 # 15670 entries!
$ git pull --depth=1
# ...pulling the shallow repo
$ git log --oneline | wc -l
1 # 15670 to 1... woah!
$ git log
# ...output from just one commitIs .git/ a lot smaller now? Not yet, because there are many dangling references. This Stack Overflow answer shows you how to cleanup that directory. After setting a depth of one and following its instructions, I reduced the Elixir repoās .git/ size by 90%.
Check out man git-pull for more information.
Zoom users, two new hotkeys for you on Mac: CMD-SHIFT-A to toggle audio and CMD-SHIFT-V to toggle video. The ability to control my A/V presentation in long video calls makes these hotkeys worth the muscle memory investment.
Zoom has another handy audio feature in preferences: temporarily unmute by pressing the spacebar. This is perfect for standups, where I mostly want to be muted, but need to be able to unmute quickly for short periods of time.
Dash has a customizable keyword for each Docset. Here are the defaults for a random Hashrocket collection*:
These keywords scope search results to one Docset; use one in the Dash search bar like so:
elixir:String.splitAnd from Alfred:
dash elixir:String.splitThis is useful when you have many Docsets, and are sure where you want to look, which should be true almost all the time. Itās nice when using two complementary technologies like Elixir and Elm that share a function namespace (such as String.split).
* Also note: this list order can be changed, as noted in the table header. Move libraries you use often above those you use rarely.
To build upon my earlier post, Integrate Alfred and Dash: Dash supports find-in-page search via a whitespace. To search on a docs page, add a space after the function or keyword name, and then enter your search query.
Hereās a command you could run to find JavaScriptās Array.prototype.unshift()and search on that docs page for the āspecificationā header, where the associated ECMAScript standards for unshift are found.
unshift specificationThis command from Alfred could look like:
dash unshift specificationToday Iām testing an intergration between Alfred, the powerful alternative to Finder, and Dash, the local-documentation tool for Mac. My goal is a single command, run from anywhere on a Mac, that searches one or many sets of docs for a named function.
This tutorials showed me how to do it. TL;DR, itās a one-click setup in Dash:
https://github.com/Kapeli/Dash-Alfred-Workflow
Once complete, I can trigger Alfred (with CMD + SPACE, or any key combo thatās not assigned elsewhere), type dash List.reverse, hit enter, and Alfred loads all the List.reverse docs Iāve downloaded in Dash.
In a Hashrocket blog post, 10 Vim Commands for a Better Workflow, I wrote about :.! <command>, which replaces the output of <command> with your current line.
Today I learned what this technique is called: filtering. From the docs:
filter is a program that accepts text at standard input, changes it in some way, and sends it to standard output. You can use the commands below to send some text through a filter, so that it is replaced by the filter output.
An even shorter version is just !!<command> in normal mode. A use case for this would be writing docs, where command-line output (ls, curl, etc.) can help demonstrate an idea.
Check out :help !! to see all the permutations of this interesting command.
A while ago I read The Mac Is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams. In it, the author claims:
Many studies have shown that all caps are much harder to read. We recognize words not only by their letter groups, but also by their shapes, sometimes called the ācoastline.ā āpg. 31, The Mac Is Not a Typewriter
Iāve found this to be true. When we teach SQL, students are often surprised that we donāt capitalize PostgreSQL keywords, preferring this:
select * from posts limit 5;To this, which you might see in an SQL textbook:
SELECT * FROM posts LIMIT 5;My arguments against the latter syntax: itās practically redundant in PostgreSQL, itās harder to type, and itās unnecessary because any good text editor highlights the keywords. Now I have another: such writing has been, in typesetting, shown to be harder to read. WHERE and LIMIT look similar from a distance in all-caps, but they mean and do different things.
Itās a style opinion each developer gets to refine for themselves. To quote Williams: āBe able to justify the choice.ā
A while ago, I restored this siteās production database to a backup captured 24 hours earlier (the reason isnāt important). Now in my terminal history, heroku pg:backups:restore a719 DATABASE_URL -rproduction is just hanging out, ready for me to accidentally smash, sending our production database hurtling back into the past. How do I remove this destructive command from my history?
In my terminal, ZSH, thereās a file called ~/.zsh_history, and a similar one for Bash. To remove the command, open that file and remove the entry from the list.
cat somefile
heroku pg:backups:restore a719 DATABASE_URL -rproduction # delete me!
lsOpen a new terminal window, and the bad command is gone.
To avoid this situation, consider the following setting (thanks Dillon!):
# ~/.zshrc
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACEWith this, any command preceded by a space is excluded from history. One could alias a destructive command to itself, preceded by a space, and save themselves a headache. Note a weird bug here: the last command appears in history, even if it should be excluded, until another command is entered. Banish it to the ether by running just an empty space as a command.
Variables such as model_, with a trailing underscore, are allowed and conventional in Elm. If youāre familiar with a language where _model can mean an unused variable, this can cause a double-take. The trailing underscore is a nod to Haskell, telling us the variable is related, or similar, to a prior variable.
Hereās an example: model_ is the argument of the update function in the Elm architecture, and model is the updated model weāll return:
> model_ = { start = "now" }
{ start = "now" } : { start : String }
> model = { model_ | start = "tomorrow" }
{ start = "tomorrow" } : { start : String }This Stack Overflow answer summarizes the convention:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/5673954/2112512
A single quote (model') was used similarly in the past; that syntax was deprecated in Elm 0.18. Hereās a GitHub issue describing that decision:
https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-plans/issues/4
Today I learned a lot about PostgreSQL.
To demonstrate, letās create a table and record, and a view that looks at our table.
create table some_table (name varchar);
insert into some_table values ('some name');
create view some_view as select name from some_table;Now, we need a test function:
create or replace function always_null() returns trigger as $always_null$
begin
return null;
end;
$always_null$ language plpgsql;Let create a trigger for our function:
create trigger some_table_trigger
instead of delete on some_view
for each row execute procedure always_null();Hereās our viewā¦ with a trigger attached!
backup=# \d some_view
View "public.some_view"
Column | Type | Collation | Nullable | Default
--------+-------------------+-----------+----------+---------
name | character varying | | |
Triggers:
some_table_trigger INSTEAD OF DELETE ON some_view FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE always_null()Our trigger can be inspected (lots of interesting info omitted):
backup=# select * from information_schema.triggers;
-[ RECORD 1 ]--------------+--------------------------------
trigger_name | some_table_triggerDrop the view, and lose the trigger:
backup=# drop view some_view;
DROP VIEW
backup=# select * from information_schema.triggers;
(0 rows)Today I got to use the flunk/1 function in an ExUnit test. I like everything about this function, from its name to its signature.
Hereās how we used it:
case result do
"bad" ->
flunk("Your result is bad, and you should feel bad.")
"good" ->
assert result_passes_other_tests(result)
endIt fit well into a helper function that should fail if my result ever comes back a certain way.
Iām doing some database exploration today and needed to find out if a collection of tables are all tables, or if some of them are views. By querying the information schema via the following: select table_name, table_type from information_schema.tables;, I learned more about each table and its type:
> select table_name, table_type from information_schema.tables;
table_name | table_type
---------------------------------------+------------
cats | BASE TABLE
dog | BASE TABLE
dogs_and_cats | VIEWSpend a bit of time with asdf, and you might see an error like this:
$ npm install
asdf: No version set for command npm
you might want to add one of the following in your .tool-versions file:
nodejs 10.15.3
nodejs 8.9.1The project Iām trying to set up via npm install doesnāt specify a Node version in .tool-versions, and since I have multiple Nodes on my machine, asdf isnāt sure which to use.
I donāt want to edit .tool-versions in this project; Iād rather asdf had a global default.
Hereās how I made that happen:
$ asdf global node 10.15.3 I use the week number (1-52) in my notetaking. How do I know what week number it is? ncal.
$ ncal -w
May 2019
Mo 6 13 20 27
Tu 7 14 21 28
We 1 8 15 22 29
Th 2 9 16 23 30
Fr 3 10 17 24 31
Sa 4 11 18 25
Su 5 12 19 26
18 19 20 21 22Though not shown in the output above, todayās date (the 10th) is highlighted in my terminal output. At the bottom of the column containing todayās date is the week number (19).
If you have a Zoom account, you have a Personal Meeting URLā a permanent video conferencing room tied to your account. It looks like this:
https://zoom.us/j/5551112342
When another person with Zoom installed visits this link in a browser, their Zoom client joins a call in your room.
A pro move is to redirect a subdomain like this to your room:
chat.tomcruise.com
Now you have a memorable link you can share with others.
Recently Iāve noticed @moduledoc false sprinkled through some Elixir projects. Whatās going on? To quote the docs:
Conveniently, Elixir allows developers to hide modules and functions from the documentation, by setting
@doc falseto hide a particular function, or@moduledoc falseto hide the whole module. If a module is hidden, you may even document the functions in the module, but the module itself wonāt be listed in the documentationā¦
Why would you see this in a project that doesnāt autogenerate docs? Possibly to satisfy a linter like Credo. In a codebase with public APIs, I think this kind of explicit statement is a good practice.
I like answering questions on Stack Overflow. It helps me stay aware of what people are struggling with in a particular language or framework. To do this well, I manage my tags. Hereās a screenshot of some of the tags Iām watching (subjects I care about and can contribute answers to) and ignoring (the rest).
With these settings, my question feed is mostly signal rather than noise.
If you visit Stack Overflow often and havenāt signed up for an account, I recommend it.
Today while pairing I learned about the killall command.
This BSD program kills processes by name, unlike kill, which uses PID.
Hereās me killing my Mac calculator:
$ ps aux | grep Calc
grep Calc
/Applications/Calculator.app/Contents/MacOS/Calculator
$ killall Calculator
$ ps aux | grep Calc
grep CalcThanks for the tip, Mark!
Reading documentation offline is a nice feature. Hereās a way to accomplish this in an Elixir Mix project.
$ cd your-mix-project
$ mix hex.docs fetch
$ mix hex.docs offline your-favorite-packageonline works, too.
In a previous post, I wrote about how jq is great because it doesnāt alphabetize JSON keys by default. I still think thatās great, because sometimes the key order is meaningful, such as might be found in a package.json file.
We can add alphabetization to jq, however, using the -S flag. To format and and sort you current buffer in Vim, run the following:
:%!jq -S '.'Happy JSON-ing!
Something that suprised me about Elixirās dependency management tooling: sometimes libraries removed from the manifest hang around in the lockfile. They are fetched and installed, and often never used.
The solution:
$ mix deps.unlock --unusedWeāve run this a few times on Today I Learned, and always found a stowaway library or two.
Today I learned about the ādiffā syntax, supported by many syntax highlighting libraries including those used by Github and Today I Learned.
Add diff to your fenced code block, and this:
def example do
- :ok
+ {:ok, :more_stuff}
endBecomes this:
def example do
- :ok
+ {:ok, :more_stuff}
endA nice use case is a README or pull request description; show instead of tell the changes you made, or someone should make.
Today I noticed a symbol in the Tmux bar that I had not noticed before, the dash (-) next to frontend:
0:code* 2:api 3:frontend-In a Tmux session, asterisk (*) is the window in focus. The dash is the previous window, which you can easily return to. From window 0, code, I can return window 1, frontend, using CTRL + bb.
A scenario I find myself in frequently: Iāve started a server in a Tmux pane, and realize I donāt need to see the server logging in my āhomeā Tmux pane (pane 0 for me).
To send a Tmux pane to its own window, use :break-pane.
A nice addition is the -n flag, which lets you set the new window name while breaking the pane.
:break-pane -n frontend-elmThe last item returned in an IEx session is accessible via the v() function. To get the item, call the function with no argument.
iex()> 1
1
iex()> v()
1This function takes a negative number as an argument, representing n steps back through history.
Heading to the internet to get help with a Python function? Slow down! Thereās help right in your terminal.
With the Python executable installed, itās as easy as:
$ python
>>> help()
help> string.lower
Help on function lower in string:
string.lower = lower(s)
lower(s) -> string
Return a copy of the string s converted to lowercase.
help>On a shared computer, multiple users logged into Hub can lead to confusing Github activity, such as a PR opened from the command line with your name on it that you didnāt open.
These credentials are stored in ~/.config/hub. To reset your Hub credentials, delete this file and run a Hub command, and you will get an opportunity to reautheniticate.
Part of my Gmail workflow includes hotkeys. Iād recommend them to anyone who wants to use their email more efficiently.
My current favorite command is gio, or gi (show inbox), combined with o (open focused message), which defaults to the newest message. gio lets me open my newest email without a mouse, faster than you can say āunsubscribeā.
Combine this with Vim motions (j and k) and youāre off to the races. š
The caffeinate command on OSX can simulate a user interacting with the system, waking it up. Hereās how youād wake up a computer and continue the simulated activity for two seconds.
$ caffeinate -u -t 2For more info, see man caffeinate on a Mac.
Elixir Mix ships with built-in CLI support, called escript. From the docs:
An escript is an executable that can be invoked from the command line. An escript can run on any machine that has Erlang/OTP installed and by default does not require Elixir to be installed, as Elixir is embedded as part of the escript.
Yesterday I built a CLI that reads an input file, does some calculations, and prints a result. For me, CLIās are often the mark of a fully-realized project, and I appreciate how the Elixir community treats CLIās as a first-class idea.
In lieu of a longer explanation, here are the docs:
Deckset for Mac is my favorite presentation software. Markdown-to-slides with prebuilt themes is pure joy.
Hereās a fun hack: ā + ] and ā + [. Use these to cycle through the Deckset themes for your current presentation. I like this feature because it helps me quickly pick a good color palette.
Hereās a problem I faced today: Iām writing a Thor CLI. The convention for that project is a file called cli, written in Ruby but with no .rb extension. Vim highlights it and otherwise treats it like a conf file, but itās Ruby. I want my editor to progamatically recognize that and act accordingly.
One solution is Vimās modeline. With modeline enabled, either of these settings will enable syntax highlighting on buffer read. They can both be used at the same time as shown.
# vi: syntax=ruby
# vi: filetype=ruby
def ruby_here
endIn my quest to learn all the Gmail hotkeys, today I learned āoā.
āoā opens the focused email in your inbox. Combine this with āgiā (go to inbox) and Vim-style JK (down/up throught the inbox list), and youāre cruising. š
Hotkeys must be enabled in your settings.
ImageMagick drawing and annotating features rely on fonts on your computer to work. But what fonts are on your computer?
On newer versions of ImageMagick, hereās how youād find out that information:
% identify -list font
Path: /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/7.0.8-24/etc/ImageMagick-7/type-apple.xml
Font: AndaleMono
family: Andale Mono
style: Undefined
stretch: Undefined
weight: 0
glyphs: /Library/Fonts//Andale Mono.ttf
...AndaleMondo and ~60 other fonts are installed on my machine and accessible by ImageMagick.
CircleCI maintains a collection of Docker containers, pre-installed with different languages and tools.
These include language image variants that can eliminate a lot of CI setup churn. I recently used the -browsers variant, which ships with Chrome, Firefox, Java 8, and Geckodriver.
Hereās how you could use such a container.
# .config/circle.yml
version: 2
jobs:
build:
docker:
- image: circleci/ruby:2.5.1-browsers
steps:
- run: rakeHave you ever seen a directory containing a single .gitkeep? Today I learned the history of that file.
Git wonāt let us add an empty directory, but sometimes thereās a good reason to want to do that. For instance, Iām building a single-page app that requireds a src/data/ directory, even when thereās no data. Instead of each developer on the project making this directory by hand, Iād like to check it into version control.
There are two competing strategies to achieve this: adding a .gitkeep to the directory, or adding a .gitignore. I prefer .gitkeep because the name tells you what it does and itās not conventionally used for another purpose.
$ touch src/data/.gitkeepIterating through a process of building many static Gatsby.js pages at once, I discovered a hacky way to see what pages have been built. Visit a page that doesnāt exist, and Gatsyās development 404 page will provide a sitemap with links to all the static pages.
Itās a little nicer than digging through the filesystem.
Today I learned about a CSS property called user-select. You might use it like this, to prevent a user from selecting text:
p {
user-select: none;
}I discovered this on an event booking website: the event description links were not anchor tags, and the content on the page was not selectable.
If youāre going to disable default behavior on a website, you need to have a good reason. My assumption (which could be wrong) is that the site creators donāt want me to select text on the page and start searching around for a better deal. I donāt think thatās a good enough reason, because there are plenty of cases where a user might copy text on a page that donāt hurt (or actually support) the event organizerās business.
Today I learned how to make separated table borders, like this:
Each td has a top and bottom border, and these settings make the separation possible:
table {
border-collapse: separate;
border-spacing: 3rem 0rem;
}The border-collapse property sets whether cells inside a table have shared or separate borders. The border-spacing property sets the distance between the borders of adjacent table cells, when border-collapse is set to separate.
More info: table properties
Iām a fan of Git command line tools. The more familiar I become with Git hosting platformās website, the more I want to control it with a CLI.
When you push a branch to Bitbucket, part of the response is a pull request URL. That URL is a create page for a pull request against the default branch.
Iāve taken this idea a step further and created a script for my project that visits this page:
#!/bin/sh
BRANCH=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
open "http://bitbucket.org/<organization>/<project>/pull-requests/new?source=${BRANCH}&t=1#diff"This script reads my current branch name and visits the Bitbucket ācreate PRā page in a diff view.