Recent Changes

2021-09-20

• 11:28 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-20 Simple tmux scripting . . . . mbork – I have recently started to use tmux instead of separate tabs in my terminal. I had a few reasons for this, one of them being that tmux is much more keyboard-oriented.

2021-09-13

• 16:18 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-13 A gotcha with PostgreSQL's jsonb type . . . . mbork – As you may probably know, I am a big fan of PostgreSQL. That doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for me to use or intuitive, though. Today I ran into something strange (which is not that strange when you think of it, but still). Consider a table with a jsonb field, which sometimes has some key and sometimes not (which is the main point of having a jsonb field after all)

2021-09-06

• 18:31 UTC (new) (history) 2021-09-06 My experience with book writing . . . . mbork – This is a rather atypical post in that it is just a bunch of thoughts about how to write a book, how not to write a book, how I’ve been writing my book on Emacs Lisp, what was easy, what was difficult etc. If you want to write a book, it might be useful to learn where a fellow author struggled – note however, that this post reflects my personal experiences and your situation, personality, experience, work style etc. may be similar or completely different. Also, this post is quite long, and – let’s say – not extremely structured. It is just a collection of thoughts, some of which might be useful, entertaining or interesting to someone – or not. You have been warned;-).

2021-08-30

• 04:14 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-30 How I avoid deleting large parts of Org buffers accidentally . . . . mbork – For today, I have a kind of obvious trick, but one that saved me a lot of trouble at least once. As many Emacs users, I am a heavy Org-mode user. However, one of the strengths of Org-mode is also one of its weaknesses. By default, it hides a lot of stuff from the user, in the sense of rendering them invisible (property drawers, folded parts of the tree etc.). This means that if I e.g. clock in and then accidentally call undo (effectively deleting my clock entry), it’s possible that I won’t notice that something is missing. Another thing I happen to press accidentally is C-c ;, which toggles the COMMENT keyword of the current entry – when I’m editing a long section of my book on Elisp, for instance, pressing C-c ; instead of C-c , (which is used to e.g. edit a source block) is pretty easy. Almost a year ago I decided to do something about it, and I came up with a primitive but working solution.

2021-08-23

• 04:22 UTC (new) (history) 2021-08-23 grep and context lines . . . . mbork – Sometimes (well, actually pretty often!) I need to search text files with grep. By default, it displays all the lines that are matched by some regular expression. As is usual with heavily-used and battle-tested shell commands, it has numerous well-though arguments, like -H and -h (print or suppress the filename prefix in every line), -n (print the line number along with the matching line) and many others. A few weeks ago, however, I had an extremely specific need, and I was very pleasantly surprised that grep supported precisely my use-case. I wanted to grep a log file having a particularly annoying format, and I wanted grep to display every match together with one preceding and two following lines. Well, it turns out that grep has such a feature, too.
• 04:21 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2021-08-16 Remapping commands . . . . mbork – Well, you're right – but still, they solve a very similar problem. At least I couldn't think about a real-life situation when only one of them would . . .

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