Like many people, I have my own scripts and stuff in a bin directory in my home directory. Actually it’s a symlink to ~/.local/bin because I saw there was a ~/.local/share which some programs use to store user-specific things and I wanted to be consistent.
Then I saw some people have ~/bin and ~/src and I thought that looked like a Continue reading
Since I use a lot of split windows in Vim, for example when exploring the git log or editing closely related files, a pattern I noticed is I often want to make one of the smaller windows full screen momentarily so I can read more at once without scrolling and then close it when I’m done. I made a really simple mapping to simulate this “full screen” idea:
:nnoremap <Leader>f :tabe %<CR>
This opens the current window’s buffer in a new tab (fake full screen ?) and when I close it I’m back to tab one with my split windows.
To demonstrate, here’s a gif in which I inspect the git blame for a file, open a patch and then open it “full screen” in a new tab:
Vim fake fullscreen demo gif
O mapping which opens the patch in a tab instead of a split and the necessity for this would be clearer with bigger files like those I edit at work.
This is one of the few things I use tabs for since I’m mostly jumping through buffers. Hopefully it’s useful for you too!
Recently I had to write a lot of attributes —titles and matching slugs (in the URL)— for a bunch of links for a simple Hungarian web page I was building. There were a lot of links. Since I was editing the HTML template and associated URL configuration in Vim, I figured I’d quickly run some macro to generate me slugs from the page titles, so that I wouldn’t have to do them one-by-one. It turned out none of the existing solutions did quite what was necessary so I developed my own solution (shown below), but first: What is a slug?
Slugifying is a step up from ascii-fication. If we take the latter to mean “removing all non-ASCII characters from a string” then slugifying simplifies it even more. The point of slugifying is to generate (usually from a link or post title) a string good for use as a URL, without the characters getting garbled up into non-human-readable URL-encoded rubbish like this:
Slugify%20text%20in%20Vim%2C%20for%20example%20%E1rv%EDzt%171r%151t%FCk%F6rf%FAr%F3g%E9p%0A
when what you really want is something like this:
slugify-text-in-vim-for-example-arvizturotukorfurogep
I based my solution on xolox’s slug function from his str collection, but even more hardcore. His doesn’t handle accented characters well.
Mine shells out to iconv, like the Diacritic plugin does.
This doesn’t work so well on OSX because apparently its transliteration is rubbish, my workaround is to do a second pass and remove OSX’s garbage. I later found out that it’s because OSX uses the BSD libiconv which is much leaner and simpler and lighter than the GNU libc (this can be a good thing) but also apparently puts in much effort into transliterating strings in locales other than English. For example, if I convert a German word like “grün” to a German locale, I expect to get “groen”, and if I convert it to ASCII, which has no accented characters, then I expect grun, with no accents.
The iconv command on OSX would give you gr”un. IMO this is not useful in any language and it also doesn’t get me any closer to removing the accents to form slugs. A Hungarian example with a typical test word:
Since I can’t expect this to work consistently on Mac and Linux and I myself often switch between both I decided to brute force it, use iconv and strip any left over apostrophes and quotes from the result to handle the OSX case:
command! Slugify call setline('.', join(split(tolower(substitute(iconv(getline('.'), 'utf8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT'), "[\"']", '', 'g')), '\W\+'), '-'))
Probably not the most elegant solution, but at least it works for me…. consistently.
Edit from the future: I have now used this so much that I’ve committed it to my vimrc.
I keep forgetting this, but it’s really useful when working in the command line so I’m writing it down now. I use the grml zsh configuration in my shell and it has several very good features; a cool one I’d use more often if I could remember the shortcut is “in-place mkdir”. The key sequence is:
Ctrl-X, Shift-M
That’s Ctrl and x, followed by an uppercase M.
Here’s an example use case: Imagine you’re writing a command to do something with a very long path, like moving a file deep into a source tree
mv File.java src/something/very/long/
except half-way in your realise some of the directories in that path don’t exist. No problem! Usually you’d have to cancel that command, create the missing directories and then type it again. Now you can just type Ctrl-X, Shift-M, the directories are created and you can just press enter to use them. Much less annoying! This can even work for different directories in the same command; move the cursor to the directory you need and zsh will create that one!
For other useful shortcuts, see the reference card.
Now that I’ve got steam, I get to be constantly pestered by e-mails sending me keys with which to identify that I am myself. To save a few steps in this annoying, repetitive process I wrote a tiny bash script which finds the key in an e-mail from steam and uses zenity to pop it up on my screen, then added a filter in Evolution Mail to mark these “steam verification” messages as read and pipe them to the pop-up script. This allows me to copy the key with a double-click and paste it into steam with a middle-click, without having to poke around in my mail client for the e-mail and the place where the key is mentioned in it.
In the hope that it saves someone else from this irksomeness, here’s the code for the script:
#/bin/bash
# Displays a pop-up showing a Steam activation key piped to it by a MUA.
# In the e-mail the steam key is wrapped in <h2> tags
# Author: Sion Le Roux <sinisterstuf@gmail.com>
# read e-mail from pipe
while read -r line; do
# find <h2>
buffer=$(echo $line | grep 'h2')
if [[ ! -z $buffer ]]; then
#strip surrounding <h2> tags
steamkey=$(echo $buffer | sed -e 's/<\/\?h2>//g')
fi
done
# display the steam code in a pop-up
zenity --info --title="Steam Key" \
--window-icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/steam.png" \
--text="<tt><big><b>$steamkey</b></big></tt>"