sebastiancarlos

It's almost done (it would take one or two weeks to clean it up for FOSS release). It's a CLI tool. It works great for my use case, but I'm wondering if there's any interest in a tool like this.

Say you have a simple time-tracking tool that tracks what you do daily. The only problem is that there are gaps and whatnot, which might not look nice if you need to send it to someone else. This tool fixes pretty much all of that.

Main format is a JSON with a "description", and either "duration" or a "start"/"end" pair. It supports the Timewarrior format out of the box (CLI Time tracking tool).

Either self-hosted or cloud, I assume many of you keep a server around for personal things. And I'm curious about the cool stuff you've got running on your personal servers.

What services do you host? Any unique stuff? Do you interact with it through ssh, termux, web server?

Hey,

As an avid CLI user, I always aimed to master non-interactive tools to perform most of my work, given that they are easy to use, create, extend, and connect.

However, I found myself dealing with software projects with many files (mostly under the yoke of corporate oppression; an ordeal which I endure to sustain myself, as most of those reading me do, and therefore I will not go further into this topic) and started to hit the limits of non-interactive tools to find and edit files. Indeed, I could go faster if I followed the temptation of monstrous IDEs, as I did in my innocent past.

I did not despair, as naturally I heard of the usefulness of interactive fuzzy finders such as fzf. After spending an afternoon evaluating the tool, I concluded that it indeed increases the complexity of my workflow. Still, this complexity is managed in a sensible way that follows the UNIX tradition.

I now ask you two general questions:

• Did you reach similar conclusions to me and decide to use interactive fuzzy finders to solve working on software projects with many files?
• If you use fzf or similar tools, what can you tell me about your workflow? Any other third-party tools? Do you integrate it into your scripts? Any advice that you can give me out of a long time of experience using the tool that is not easily conveyed by the documentation?

I also ask this very specific question:

• The one part of fzf which I found missing was a way to interact with the results of grep, and to automatically place the selected file(s) in the prompt or an editor. For that, I created the following two commands. Do you have a similar workflow when you want to bring the speed of fuzzy finding to grep?

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# gf: grep + fzf
# basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d:'

# print usage on -h/--help
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: gf <grep-args>"
    echo
    echo "~~~ that feel when no 'gf' ~~~"
    echo
    echo "- Basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d:'"
    echo "- Opens fzf with grep results, and prints the selected filename(s)"
    echo "- Note: As this is meant to search files, it already adds the -r flag"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $ nvim \`gf foobar\`"
    echo "  $ gf foobar | xargs nvim"
    exit 0
fi

# run grep with arguments, pipe to fzf, and print the filename(s) selected
custom_grep () {
    grep -E --color=always --binary-files=without-match --recursive "$@"
}
remove_color () {
    sed -E 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*[mK]//g'
}
custom_fzf () {
    fzf --ansi --height ~98%
}
grep_output=$(custom_grep "$@")
if [[ "$?" -ne 0 ]]; then
    exit 1
else
    echo "$grep_output" | custom_fzf | remove_color | cut -f 1 -d:
fi

#! /usr/bin/env bash

# ge: grep + fzf + editor
# basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d: | $EDITOR'

# print usage on -h/--help
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: ge <grep-args>"
    echo
    echo "- Basically a wrapper for 'grep <ARGS> | fzf | cut -f 1 -d: | \$EDITOR'"
    echo "- Opens fzf with grep results, and edits the selected file(s)"
    echo "- Note: As this is meant to search files, it already adds the -r flag"
    echo "- Note: Internally, it uses the 'gf' command"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $ ge foobar"
    exit 0
fi

# takes output from 'gf' and opens it in $EDITOR
grep_fzf_output=$(gf "$@")
if [[ -n "$grep_fzf_output" ]]; then
  $EDITOR "$grep_fzf_output"
fi

Have a wonderful day, you CLI cowboys.

Source code:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# runasm - Assemble, link, and run multiple assembly files, then delete them.
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: runasm  [ ...]"
    echo "  - Assemble, link, and run multiple assembly files, then delete them."
    echo "  - Name of executable is the name of the first file without extension."
    exit 1
fi

object_files=()
executable_file=${1%.*}

for assembly_file in "$@"; do
    # Avengers, assemble!
    object_file="${assembly_file%.*}.o"
    as "${assembly_file}" -o "${object_file}"
    if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
        exit 1
    fi
    object_files+=("${object_file}")
done

# Link
ld "${object_files[@]}" -o "${executable_file}"
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
    exit 1
fi

# Run, remove created files, and return exit code
./"${executable_file}"
exit_code=$?
rm "${object_files[@]}" "${executable_file}" > /dev/null 2>&1
exit "${exit_code}"

I need extremely small tiling windows, say something with only a width/height of 10px. However, by experimentation I found that my window manager Sway (and likely also i3) has a hard-coded minimum height of 60px and minimum width of 100px.

So, dear Linux gurus, do you know of a window manager with configurable minimum tiling window size? Or with no minimum at all? Bonus point for running natively on Wayland.

Edit: Found the culprit in the sway codebase:

sway/include/sway/tree/node.h

#define MIN_SANE_W 100
#define MIN_SANE_H 60

In short, I am not sane.

These constants are not used much in the codebase, so it shouldn't hurt to change it and compile from source. I will report results. Btw I opened an issue to see if they can be made configurable. Plus, some code archaeology suggests that this is not an issue in i3.

Thanks for your suggestions. Some, like Hyprland and dwl, sound promising, but I'll try to make it work with Sway first.

Why do I need this, you ask? It's a bit of a secret, but I've been working for about two years on a custom "operating system", or rather a suite of productivity tools unlike anything seen before. I'm about to finish it, but one of my last requirements to make it all click is a tiling window manager that is both extremely minimal and extremely customizable. It will eventually be released as free software for the benefit, amusement, and horror of everyone.

Also the top 20px of my screen has burn-in and I want to declare it unusable at the window manager level. You see, I use Linux not only to flex, but also to live frugally.

Edit 2: Compiling from source worked. Patch here:

diff --unified --recursive --text sway-git/include/sway/tree/node.h sway-git.new/include/sway/tree/node.h
***
sway-git/include/sway/tree/node.h	2023-10-23 19:21:15.915536904 +0200
+++ sway-git.new/include/sway/tree/node.h	2023-10-23 19:30:18.638894754 +0200
@@ -4,8 +4,8 @@
 #include 
 #include "list.h"
 
-#define MIN_SANE_W 100
-#define MIN_SANE_H 60
+#define MIN_SANE_W 20
+#define MIN_SANE_H 20
 
 struct sway_root;
 struct sway_output;