Today I Learned

Short TIL posts

1834 posts latest post 2026-04-18
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 20 posts
Two new shell aliases for git

Recently I added two new bash/zsh aliases to make my git experience just a tad better.

Most of our work repos were recently migrated to new remote urls, we scriped out the update to all of the repos, but I was left with a tracking error for all of my open branches. To easily resolve this I just made an alias so that I can just run trackme anytime I see this error.

There is no tracking information for the current branch. Please specify which branch you want to merge with. See git-pull(1) for details git pull <remote> <branch> If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with: git branch --set-upstream develop origin/<branch>

getting the branch #

The following command will always return the currently checked out branch name.

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

Injecting this into the suggested...

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git
IPython q to exit

So many terminal applications bind q to exit, even the python debugger, its muscle memory for me. But to exit ipython I have to type out exit<ENTER>. This is fine, but since q is muscle memory for me I get this error a few times per day.

╭─────────────────────────────── Traceback (most recent call last) ────────────────────────────────╮ │ <ipython-input-1-2b66fd261ee5>:1 in <module> │ ╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯ NameError: name 'q' is not defined

After digging way too deep into how IPython implements its ExitAutoCall I realized there was a very simple solution here. IPython automatically imports all the scripts you put in your profile directory, all I needed was to create...

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Copier Slugify | python templating | using cookiecutter

It’s no secret that I love automation, and lately my templating framework of choice has been copier. One hiccup I recently ran into was having spaces in my templated directory names. This makes it harder to run commands against as you need to escape them, and if they end up in a url you end up with ugly %20 all over.

Yes the solution comes from a competing templating framework.

I install copier with pipx, so I need to inject cookiecutter in to my copier environment to use the slugify filter.

pipx inject copier cookiecutter

If you are using a normal virtual environment you can just pip install it.

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Textual has devtools

Textual has devtools in the upcoming css branch, and its pretty awesome!

Textual is still very early and not really ready for prime time, but it’s quite amazing how easy some things such as creating keybindings is. The docs are coming, but missing right now so if you want to use textual be ready for reading source code and examples.

As @willmcgugan shows in this tweet it’s pretty easy to setup, it requires having two terminals open, or using tmux, and currently you have to use the css branch.

https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1531294412696956930

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⭐ curl curl

curl has done a fantastic job with curl. Highly recommend taking a look.

A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features