You might have heard about bookmarklets . In short, they’re little bits of JavaScript that you can run from a browser bookmark on a page you’re looking at. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at writing little bits of JavaScript. Here’s one that I got ChatGPT to whip up for me so I could more easily take notes on a series of pages I was reading: javascript : (() => { const h1 =…
A lot of people — mostly ones who learned to make Web pages in the late 90s — are fans of what I’ll call the view-source ethos . Here it is in a nutshell: You will do cool things on your website. Other people who are making websites of their own will want to learn from your website and understand how it’s made. Shipping minified, concatenated, and obfuscated source code interferes with that,…
Now that iPadOS 15 is out, people are starting to use 🌐︎ as a keyboard-shortcut icon in addition to the usual ⌘ , ⌥ , ⌃ , and ⇧ 1 . However, 🌐︎ also works as an emoji, and if you just put a raw U+1F310 in your document, you might get an emoji-looking 🌐️ in your document instead of a colorless text one. While Safari in macOS defaults to text presentation (🌐︎), Safari in iOS and iPadOS defaults…
(Consider skipping to the live example .) You’re probably familiar with abstract base classes in object-oriented languages. In a nutshell, abstract base classes let you set up some expectations of what a derived class must do, but nobody can actually instantiate instances of the base class. One needs to create a derived class, then create objects that are instances of that derived class. A similar…
Have you considered having more breakpoints than you have breakpoints? Let me explain. When people say “breakpoint”, they’re usually referring to one of two definitions: breakpoint₁ A viewport width that has a @media (max-width: …) or @media (min-width: …) somewhere in a site’s CSS. breakpoint₂ A viewport width at which you rejigger your site’s layout so it looks good, if different, at widths…
One of the limitations of folder-sync software like Dropbox and Syncthing is that it’s a bad idea to put git repositories in synced folders. In short, if there’s a sync conflict in a file, the conflicting files will be duplicated and the user will have to sort out which is the right file to use. Annoying, but tolerable if it happens only occasionally. However, if one of the conflicting files is…
(Since writing this I’ve started to use fzf’s built-in shell integration because it doesn’t make any symlinks anymore. I’m leaving this page up for historical purposes, though.) I’ve been getting into fzf recently. In case what it does isn’t immediately obvious to you (it wasn’t to me), here’s what it does: You send a bunch of things to fzf , one per line. fzf lets you pick one (or more!) of the…
I’ve been trying fish , however briefly, for a few years now. This time, I finally stuck with it. If you’re interested in seeing what the initial adjustment period is like, have a look at fish: the inital adjustment period . Previously, I’d try fish only to discover that it didn’t support changing the title of Terminal.app or that fish sessions wouldn’t restore properly 1 . By fish 3.0.2, both of…
A while ago, I switched from bash to fish . This time, I stuck with it. After reading this, you should have a better idea of the hassles involved with switching to a new shell. (I’m going to assume that you know what a shell is. While I don’t expect you to have used anything other than bash , I assume you’ve heard of other shells like zsh and tcsh .) Even an old version of bash is good enough…
People like reading in bed right before bed. Unfortunately, the best thing to read is frequently a phone or tablet. This appears to be bad, but this will be less bad in the future once websites start supporting automatic dark modes. You can help your visitors get to sleep faster, rest more, and be closer their fullest selves if you keep your website’s lights to a minimum when they’re browsing your…