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2457 posts latest post 2026-04-19
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Apr 2026 | 40 posts

If Tmux

I do much of my work from tmux, I love it so much that I want to setup some functionality that puts me in tmux even if I didn’t ask for it.

Bash function to check if the shell is in a tmux session.

in_tmux () { if [ -n "$TMUX" ]; then return 0 else return 1 fi }

Using the bash function #

I often open up vim to do some quite edits, but before I know it I have several splits open and I need access to another shell utility, but I forgot to start in tmux. This function makes sure tht I start in tmux everytime.

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Save Vim Macro

If you are like me, you have created a macro or two that is pure glory, and you forget how you made it after a day or so, or you immediately want to store it away as a custom keybinding. As with most things with vim, it’s easy to do once you understand it.

One of the earliest things we all learn to do in vim is to create macros, custom sets of functionality stored in a register that can be replayed later.

To create a macro, get into normal mode, then type q followed by a letter that you want to store the macro under.

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3 min read
Live Substitution In Neovim

Live Substitution In Neovim

Replacing text in vim can be quite frustrating especially since it doesn’t have live feedback to what is changing. Today I was watching Josh Branchaud’s Vim-Unalphabet series on Youtuve and realized that his vim was doing this and I had to have it.

https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1346081617199198210

I had to do a bit of searching and found a great post from vimcasts that shows exactly how to get the live search and replace highlighting using inccomand

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Newsboat

Web browsers are a black hole of productivity. I try to use them as little as possible when it is time to focus. I try to use help, ?, or ?? with ipython, or –help at the command line as much as possible. What about that time I am trying to see what my online friends are posting on their sites? I used to used google reader quite heavily before that was taken down.

I am going to give a terminal rss reader a try for a bit and see how that goes for me. I have really struggled to get into an rss reader since google reader died.

I installed with the reccomended snap for Ubuntu.

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Large Refactor At The Command Line

As projects grow patterns that worked early on break and we need to change things to make the project easier to work with, and more welcoming to new developers.

Before you start mucking up a project with wild commands at the terminal check that you have a super clean git status. We may make some mistakes and need a way to undo 100’s files and git makes it really easy if you start with a clean history.

git status

If we are ready to begin work we should see a response like this.

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4 min read

Ipython-Config

I use my ipython terminal daily. It’s my go to way of running python most of the time. After you use it for a little bit you will probably want to setup a bit of your own configuration.

Activate your virtual environment of choice and pip install it. Any time you are running your project in a virtual environment, you will need to install ipython inside it to access those packages from ipython.

pip install ipython

You are using a virtual environment right? Virtual environments like venv or conda can save you a ton of pain down the road.

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2 min read

Custom Ipython Prompt

I’ve grown tired of the standard ipython prompt as it doesn’t do much to give me any useful information. The default one gives out a line number that only seems to add anxiety as I am working on a simple problem and see that number grow to several hundred. I start to question my ability 🤦‍♂️.

If you already have an ipython config you can move on otherwise check out this post on creating an ipython config.

Ipython-Config

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3 min read

Automating my Post Starter

One thing we all dread is mundane work of getting started, and all the hoops it takes to get going. This year I want to post more often and I am taking some steps towards making it easier for myself to just get started.

When I start a new post I need to cd into my blog directory, start neovim in a markdown file with a clever name, copy some frontmatter boilerplate, update the post date, add tags, a description, and a cover.

hot and fast

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Windowing Python Lists

In python data science we often will reach for pandas a bit more than necessary. While pandas can save us so much there are times where there are alternatives that are much simpler. The itertoolsandmore-itertools` are full of cases of this.

This post is a walkthrough of me solving a problem with more-itertools rather than reaching for a for loop, or pandas.

I am working on a one-line-link expander for my blog. I ended up doing it, just by modifying the markdown with python. I first split the post into lines with content.split('\n'), then look to see if the line appears to be just a link. One more safety net that I wanted to add was to check if there was whitespace around the line, this could not simply be done in a list comprehension by itself. I need just a bit of knowledge of the surrounding lines, enter more-itertools.

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1 min read