Posts tagged: cli

All posts with the tag "cli"

96 posts latest post 2026-04-29
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 1 posts
ag silver searcher look ahead and look behind

A super useful tool when doing PR’s or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run ag "<search term>" to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match.

It’s often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR’s that moved schema from save_args to the root of the dataset in all yaml configs. To ensure they all made it to the top level DataSet configuraion, and not underneath save_args. I can do a search for all the schemas, and ensure that none of them are under save_args anymore.

Neovim Config for Git

Creating a minimal config specifically for git commits has made running git commit much more pleasant. It starts up Much faster, and has all of the parts of my config that I use while making a git commit. The one thing that I often use is autocomplete, for things coming from elsewhere in the tmux session. For this cmpe-tmux specifically is super helpful.

The other thing that is engrained into my muscle memory is jj for escape. For that I went agead and added my settings and keymap with no noticable performance hit.

Here is the config that has taken

~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim

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Squoosh cli

Today I discovered a sweet new cli for compressing images. squoosh cli is a wasm powered cli that supports a bunch of formats that I would want to convert my website images to.

First the main feature of squoosh is a web app that makes your images smaller right in the browser, using the same wasm. It’s sweet! There is a really cool swiper to compare the output image with the original, and graphical dials to change your settings.

What is even cooler is that once you have settings you are happy with and are really cutting down those kb’s on your images, there is a copy cli command button! If you have npx (which you should if you have nodejs and npm) already installed it just works without installing anything more.

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Tmux and Vim Clipboard for Ubuntu

One of the first things I noticed broken in my terminal based workflow moving from Windows wsl to ubuntu was that my clipboard was all messed up and not working with my terminal apps. Luckily setting tmux and neovim to work with the system clipboard was much easier than it was on windows.

First off you need to get xclip if you don’t already have it provided by your distro. I found it in the apt repositories. I have used it between Ubuntu 18.04 and 21.10 and they all work flawlessly for me.

I have tmux setup to automatically copy any selection I make to the clipboard by setting the following in my ~/.tmux.conf. While I have neovim open I need to be in insert mode for this to pick up.

# ~/tmux.conf bind -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -i -f -selection primary | xclip -i -selection clipboard" bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -selection clipboard -i"

To get my yanks to go to the system clipboard in neovim, I just added unnamedplus to my existing clipboard variable.

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nix rescues modded minecraft night

With the latest version of minecraft it requires a very new, possibly the latest, version of java. Lately we have been getting into modded minecraft and I maintain the server for us. It’s been tricky to say the least. One hurdle I recently hit involves having the wrong version of java.

I was getting this error trying to get a 1.12.2 forge server running.

Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: class jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader cannot be cast to class java.net.URLClassLoader (jdk.internal.loader.ClassLoaders$AppClassLoader and java.net.URLClassLoader are in module java.base of loader ‘bootstrap’)

In researching our errors, I found this on a forum.

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cli
Tmux hotkey for copier templates

I have added a hotkey to my copier template setup to quickly access all my templates at any time from tmux. At any point I can hit <c-b><c-b>, thats holding control and hitting bb, and I will get a popup list of all of my templates directory names. Its an fzf list, which means that I can fuzzy search through it for the template I want, or arrow key to the one I want if I am feeling insane. I even setup it up so that the preview is a list of the files that come with the template in tree view.

bind-key c-b popup -E -w 80% -d '#{pane_current_path}' "\ pipx run copier copy ~/.copier-templates/`ls ~/.copier-templates |\ fzf --header $(pwd) --preview='tree ~/.copier-templates/{} |\ lolcat'` . \ "

I’ve had this on my systems for a few weeks now and I am constantly using it for my tils, blogs, and my .envrc file that goes into all of my projects to make sure that I have a

cli copier linux python tmux
Markata Filters as Telescope Pickers in Neovim

I often pop into my blog from neovim with the intent to look at just a single series of posts, til, gratitude, or just see todays posts. Markata has a great way of mapping over posts and returning their path that is designe exactly for this use case.

Markata listing out posts from the command line

To tie these into a Telescope picker you add the command as the find_command, and comma separate the words of the command, with no spaces. I did also --sort,date,--reverse in there so that the newest posts are closest to the cursor.

nnoremap geit <cmd>Telescope find_files find_command=markata,list,--map,path,--filter,date==today<cr> nnoremap geil...

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Copier Tasks | Python templating post run task

Copier allows you to run post render tasks, just like cookiecutter. These are defined as a list of tasks in your copier.yml. They are simply shell commands to run.

The example I have below runs an update-gratitude bash script after the copier template has been rendered.

# copier.yml num: 128 _answers_file: .gratitude-copier-answers.yml _tasks: - "update-gratitude"

I have put the script in ~/.local/bin so that I know it’s always on my $PATH. It will reach back into the copier.yml and update the default number.

fuzzy wallpaper with fzf

I really appreciate that in linux anything can be scripted, including setting the wallpaper. So everytime I disconnect a monitor I can just rerun my script and fix my wallpaper without digging deep into the ui and fussing through a bunch of settings.

feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/my_wallpaper.png

I set my default wallpaper with feh using the command above.

Leaning in on feh, we can use fzf to pick a wallpaper from a directory full of wallpapers with very few keystrokes.

alias wallpaper='ls ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper | fzf --preview="feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}" | xargs -I {} feh --bg-scale ~/.config/awesome/wallpaper/{}'

I have mine alias’d to wallpaper so that I can quickly run it from my terminal.

Converting markdown to pdf with pandoc on linux

Converting markdown posts to pdf on ubuntu takes a few packages from the standard repos. I had to go through a few stack overflow posts, and nothing seemed to have all the fonts and packages that I needed to convert markdown, but this is what ended up working for me.

sudo apt install \ pandoc \ texlive-latex-base \ texlive-fonts-recommended \ texlive-extra-utils \ texlive-latex-extra \ texlive-xetex

Using pandoc to convert markdown to a pdf #

# older versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 18.04 pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --latex-engine=xelatex # newer versions of pandoc, I needed this one on ubuntu 21.04 pandoc pages/til/convert-markdown-pdf-linux.md -o convert-markdown-pdf.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex
results of converting...</p></div> </div> <footer class=
blog cli linux
Installing Pipx on Ubuntu

I recently paired up with another dev running windows with Ubuntu running in wsl, and we had a bit of a stuggle to get our project off the ground because they were missing com system dependencies to get going.

Open up a terminal and get your required system dependencies using the apt package manager and the standard ubuntu repos.

sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install \ python3-dev \ python3-pip \ python3-venv \ python3-virtualenv pip install pipx

Using an Ansible-Playbook #

I like running things like this through an ansible-playbook as it give me some extra control and repeatability next time I have a new machine to setup.

- hosts: localhost gather_facts: true become: true become_user: "{{ lookup('env', 'USER') }}" pre_tasks: - name: update repositories apt: update_cache=yes become_user: root changed_when: False vars: user: "{{ ansible_user_id }}" tasks: - name: Install System Packages 1 (terminal) become_user: root apt: name: - build-essential - python3-dev - python3-pip - python3-venv - python3-virtualenv -...

2 minutes to stow

Stow is an incredible way to manage your dotfiles. It works by managing symlinks between your dotfiles directory and the rest of the system. You can then make your dotfiles directory a git repo and have it version controlled. In my honest opinion, when I was trying to get started the docs straight into deep detail of things I frankly don’t really care about and jumped right over how to use it.

When using stow its easiest to keep your dotfiles directory (you may name it what you want) in your home directory, with application directories inside of it.

Then each application directory should reflet the same diretory structure as you want in your home directory.

Here is a simple example with my zshrc.

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Using Copier Answers to rerun templates quickly

The copier answers file is a key component to making your templates re-runnable. Let’s look at the example for my setup.py.

❯ tree ~/.copier-templates/setup.py /home/walkers/.copier-templates/setup.py ├── [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl ├── copier.yml ├── setup.cfg └── setup.py.tmpl 0 directories, 4 files

Inside of my [[ _copier_conf.answers_file ]].tmpl file is this, a message not to muck around with it, and the ansers in yaml form. The first line is just a helper for the blog post.

# ~/.copier-templates/setup.py/\[\[\ _copier_conf.answers_file\ \]\].tmpl # Changes here will be overwritten by Copier; NEVER EDIT MANUALLY [[_copier_answers|to_nice_yaml]]

Inside my copier.yml I have setup my _answers_file to point to a special file. This is because this is not a whole projet template, but one just for a single file.

# copier.yml # ... _answers_file: .setup-py-copier-answers.yml

Once I change the _answers_file I was incredibly stuck

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Making a Textual Widget from a Rich Renderable

Once you have made your sick looking cli apps with rich, eventually you are going to want to add some keybindings to them. Currently Textual, also written by @willmcgugan, does this extremely well. Fair Warning it is in super beta mode and expected to change a bunch. So take it easy with hopping on the train so fast.

Install them from the command line.

pip install textual pip install rich

Import make a .py file and import them in it.

from textual.app import App from textual.widget import Widget from rich.panel import Panel

Make what you have a widget #

If you return your rich renderable out...

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pipx examples

count lines of code # pipx run pygount markata pipx run pygount markata --format=summary pipx run pygount markata --suffix=cfg,py,yml
Tmux Pop size

tmux popups can be sized how you like based on the % width of the terminal on creation by using the flags (h, w, x, y) for height, width, and position.

# normal popup tmux popup figlet "Hello" # fullscreen popup tmux popup -h 100% -w 100% figlet "Hello" # 75% centered popup tmux popup -h 100% -w 75% figlet "Hello" # 75% popup on left side tmux popup -h 100% -w 75% -x 0% figlet "Hello"

example running these commands

Changing copier template strings (_endops)

I was completely stuck for awhile. copier was not replacing my template variables. I found out that adding all these _endops fixed it. Now It will support all of these types of variable wrappers

# copier.yml _templates_suffix: .jinja _envops: block_end_string: "%}" block_start_string: "{%" comment_end_string: "#}" comment_start_string: "{#" keep_trailing_newline: true variable_end_string: "}}" variable_start_string: "{{"

!RTFM: Later I read the docs and realized that copier defaults to using [[ and ]] for its templates unlike other tools like cookiecutter.

copier template variables

I’ve been looking for a templating tool for awhile that works well with single files. My go to templating tool cookiecutter does not work for single files, it needs to put files into a directory underneath of it.

By default copier uses double square brackets for its variables. variables in files, directory_names, or file_names will be substituted for their value once you render them.

# hello-py/hello.py.tmpl print('hello-[[name]]')

note! by default copier will not inject variables into your template-strings unless you use a .tmpl suffix.

Before running copier we need to tell copier what variables to ask for, we do this with a copier.yml file.

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