Computers these days usually have some way to let humans search for stuff. Most of them present the results in a long list for the human to navigate. But depending on what you're trying to do, that might not be the best or even a reasonable interface to use. What is Searching and Summoning? Let's think about movies for a bit. Imagine you're looking for movies starring Jet Li. You…
…Huh? What? Last night I fixed the font size for monospaced segments on this website by setting the font-family CSS property with this snippet: code, kbd { font-family: 'fix the damn font size', monospace; } …and it works. As intended. Martin, what are you talking about‽ Let’s start with some context. I strive to respect the aesthetic preferences of the person using the computer, and as…
What? Why!? Modern text editors provide lots of commands for manipulating text. Unix shell pipelines also combine into text manipulation utilities, and of course both overlap sometimes. Sorting lines of text is a common first-class command in both environments. My own approach to editing text changed through using aoeui (asdfg really), a terminal-based editor that eschews many builtin commands in…
My main text editing environment these days is Acme , and has been for a while now. If you're unfamiliar with Acme, Russ Cox has recorded an excellent demonstration . This is not an introduction to Acme, nor is it a setup guide. But if you've tried or seen or read about Acme and were wondering how people could possibly be productive with it, this might help point you in some direction.…
Errors are values In his post "Errors are values" , Rob Pike, one of the original authors of Go, attends the common perception that one must repetitively type if err != nil in order to handle errors. He recounts an encounter of his with another Go programmer who had some code that looked like this (omitting the slice expressions because they’re irrelevant here): _, err = fd.Write(p0) if err != nil…