Recent Changes

2019-08-31

• 11:17 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-31 A simple tip with overlays and diffs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I had an interesting problem. I had to resolve a particlarly nasty Git merge. It involved several files with lines’ lengths in the triple digits and a fair number of very small changes. Seeing those changes (in smerge-mode), even after refining the diffs, was tricky – there were many very small patches (sometimes two, sometimes four characters) of changed text and I was quite afraid that I would miss some of them. I searched for a command to “go to the next patch of changes”, but to no avail. Then I decided to write my own.

2019-08-26

• 20:42 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-26 PostgreSQL – COALESCE and NULLIF . . . . Marcin Borkowski – After the last week’s long post I decided that I needed some rest, so today I only have a short tip. It is a common need to say that we want the value of some variable x unless it is some kind of null value (depending on the language we use), in which case we want the value of some other variable y. The Lisp idiom for that is of course (or x y). In JavaScript, we usually say x || y, although this is risky if 0 is a valid value of x. (Hopefully, we will be able to say x ?? y in JS soon.) In my case, however, I needed this in SQL (more specifically, in PostgreSQL, but that doesn’t matter now).

2019-08-19

• 20:56 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-19 Transplanting a directory to another Git repository . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Recently, I had a very specific need. I wanted to move a directory to another Git repo, but I really needed to preserve its history.

2019-08-11

• 19:18 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-11 A console.dir hint . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As everyone knows, console.log is the ultimate debugging tool. ;-) Joking aside, it is genuinely useful (together with console.error) in scripts. I often write small (and sometimes not so small) CLI utilities in Node.js, and they are really indispensable. Sometimes, however, you want to output a complicated structure.

2019-08-05

• 17:04 UTC (new) (history) 2019-08-05 datefudge and agenda testing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, a question was asked on the Org-mode mailing list about a specific kind of task in Org agenda. This made me think about debugging one’s agenda settings. I’ve already written about batch agenda, but one problem with agenda testing is that it is inherently stateful, in one of the worst ways – it depends on the notion of now. Debugging time-related stuff is hard. (Well, time-related stuff is hard, after all.) It would be great if you could just manipulate Emacs into thinking that the time is some day in the future (or in the past)… Well, actually, it can be done – and it’s easier than I thought.

More...