Command line productivity stuff

2023-03-25

In 2016, I wrote a list of things that I found to be useful or interesting information about the work I did at the time https://cmdcolin.github.io/posts/2016-04-06

I thought it would be interesting to do the same now

#Aliases

I use many "double tap" aliases for lots of things. They are not very 'mnemonic', but I like the action of double tapping a key. Here is a list of some of my favorites. I don't expect you will like the shortenings

• qq - runs exit to exit shell
• ss - runs yarn start
• yy - runs yarn lint
• bb - one of my favorite non-obvious ones, it lists all git branches recently used in a fzf window git branch --sort=-committerdate| fzf --height=20% |xargs git checkout
• ccc - runs yarn test --maxWorkers=50% - my audio glitches out without the maxWorkers
• g - git status. I will type out git for other subcommands, but I check git status a lot and didn't end up liking one letter g + subcommand added
• gd - git diff
• gggg - runs git add . && git commit --amend --no-edit so I can keep adding to the last commit instead of making new commits

Also recommend https://github.com/rupa/z, very quickly jump to commonly used directories. I alias z to p because I try to type with my right hand.

#Neovim/editor stuff

I use neovim, I run lots of stuff off nightly, and my setup changes a lot just as I like to tweak things, but here are some currently nice things I like about my workflow

• Visual select block, use gq to wrap code comments in vim (or gw with lsp enabled, see reason why gw here https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/39200/wrapping-comment-in-visual-mode-not-working-with-gq)

• Add proseWrap: always to your .prettierrc to wrap e.g. the lines in markdown files https://prettier.io/docs/en/options.html#prose-wrap

• Setting up "LSP support" in vim can be hard, but rewarding. I went through a whole gammut of using w0rp/ale, then coc.nvim, and then now 'built-in neovim LSP'. I like it, but it was to me not easy to set up. I recommend https://github.com/VonHeikemen/lsp-zero.nvim as it makes it easier

• Setup format on save. There are many ways to do it, but try to find out some way that works for you! For me, I use formatter.nvim to run prettier on most web dev filetypes. I use formatter.nvim and not a LSP-based format like null-ls because I just haven't gotten it to work with null-ls, but I don't think the formatter.nvim is a bad approach either -- formatter.nvim is a bit 'simpler' compared to LSP based setups

• To search files in a current directory, I hit ,gg (comma is my leader key) which triggers map('n', '<leader>gg', '<cmd>Telescope git_files<cr>', default_opts), to search by text, I use ,ff (comma is my leader key) which triggers map('n', '<leader>ff', '<cmd>Telescope live_grep<cr>', default_opts)

• I do not use a 'sidebar file browser' like nerdtree or similar. As mentioned above, I primarily navigate with ,gg but I also use vim-vinegar, which let's me hit - and that opens a file browser of the current directory, and I can hop around and hit keys to rename (R), delete (D), create (%) new files in the directory. I often go back to the zsh shell to do more sophisticated operations

• Snippets: to console.log, I created a snippet where I can type cl, then it will popup an autocomplete window, which let's me choose to insert console.log({|}) or console.log(|) where | indicates where the cursor goes after hitting enter. The console.log({}) is very handy because if you fill in console.log({variable}) then the output will be {variable:5} so you get the variable name and value easily (ref https://github.com/cmdcolin/dotfiles/blob/master/lua/snips.lua)

#Typescript

• Use ts-expect-error instead of ts-ignore -- probably a better intention most of the time

• Use type inference as much as possible -- personal opinion but even things like explicit function return type are often worse than the inferred type

#Web dev

• Try firefox profiler, it has built-in flamegraph style visualization. For Chrome profiler, you can use an external tool https://speedscope.app/ for similar

#Tmux

• Ctrl+] is my prefix in tmux. I use my right hand entirely to type it, then I split horizontally with - and vertically with =. My general coding generally has my screen split vertically with a horizontal on one or both sides

• Add the weather in your tmux footer I use set -g status-left '#(curl "wttr.in/Albuquerque?u&format=3") '

• Enable truecolors in tmux! On my machine, I needed the following in my tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
set -ag terminal-overrides ",xterm-256color:RGB"

Without this, all the neovim color schemes I tried looked not just subtly off, but significantly off, because it had only 256 colors without it (way less than the millions with true color). Resources

https://gist.github.com/andersevenrud/015e61af2fd264371032763d4ed965b6 https://jdhao.github.io/2018/10/19/tmux_nvim_true_color/

#Music related

• yda - alias for getting a song from youtube "youtube-dl -f 'bestaudio[ext=m4a]' "
• vaporwave - a function to slow down the audio for a track with ffmpeg

function vaporwave() {
  ffmpeg -i "$1" -af "asetrate=44100*${2:-0.66},aresample=44100" "`basename $1 .m4a`.vaporwave.m4a"
}

example usage:

vaporwave file.mp3 # default slowdown factor of 0.66, outputs file.vaporwave.mp3
vaporwave file.mp3 0.5 # custom slowdown factor, outputs file.vaporwave.mp3

#Audio players

I worked on a couple projects to make custom music players to scratch my own itch. I made a Rust one, to try to replace foobar2000, hoping to go back to the days of yore when I used a desktop player, and then a web based one when I realized I just listen to alot of youtube anyways now

• Rust+GTK4 app https://github.com/cmdcolin/fml9000
• Web based https://cmdcolin.github.io/ytshuffle/

Currently attempting to get the web based version approved by youtube compliance because they give you quite a limited number of API requests, so unless I want other users of my app to supply their own key, it seems prudent to get it approved