Recent content on Jordan Torbiak
Intro bash’s extglob feature enables some additional pattern-matching syntax and brings globbing capabilities a lot closer to typical popular regular expression dialects. In my experience, though, the only extglob operators I’ve ever had occasion to use are @(<pat>|...) , which matches one of the given subpatterns, and !(<pat>|...) , which matches anything except one of the given…
In short, I’ve settled on a dark 4-bit terminal palette that is readable for the default and black background colors and use other techniques to workaround unreadable foreground/background combinations, which are mostly when two relatively light colors are put together. I do :set t_Co=16 in my vimrc so themes that check it use the terminal palette instead of the absolute 8-bit color model,…
Motivation I usually watch YouTube videos while I wash dishes, and if videos have very different volume levels it can be either annoying to not understand what’s being said or painful to endure loud sounds while I dry my hands so that I can adjust the volume. So I’ve been delighted over the past couple years using a compressor filter from Steve Harris’ LADSPA plugin suite with…
Recently I’ve noticed a few cases where I’ve been solving a problem and determined that some approach doesn’t work, only to get stuck on other approaches too and finally return to the supposedly broken approach and realize that it actually works. Occasionally I’ll explicitly set out to rewrite a piece of broken code using the same approach and it’ll work and I can…
Introduction I wanted to learn a charting tool that is: convenient enough to quickly create rough data visualizations without it feeling like an indulgent digression fast enough to visualize large datasets, maybe millions of points scriptable, so chart source code plays well with version control Without doing much research on the options I decided to start with the venerable gnuplot. Data…
Motivation: tedious fixups Here’s the situation. I’m working on a feature and end up with a chain of commits that depend on each other. It’d be easier for me as the author to put all the work in a single commit, but I like telling stories with my commits to (hopefully) make reviewing the branch easier and the history more meaningful in general. Anyway, the review goes back and…
Confusion I remember the first time I tried to use the find command on Linux, over a decade ago. I knew a substring of the name of a file I wanted to find, had found something on the web suggesting I use find , and was so disappointed when I couldn’t just run find $SUBSTR to get my desired result. “Surely such a command exists,” I thought. And it basically does, with locate , but…
Motivation I’ve stuck with Apple laptops primarily because I haven’t had a pleasant trackpad experience on anything else. But about a year ago I noticed I was spending all my time in a web browser and tmux and had disabled or was avoiding many of OSX’s features, like the Dock, Dashboard, full-screen apps (due to the lengthy animations), Spotlight (because mdworker indexing…
Dissatisfied with explorer.exe ? Find drag-and-drop and manual window placement tedious? Like using the keyboard? Don’t want to choose between the hundreds of Norton Commander clones? You should try Proto . Proto is a fast, weird, original, keyboard-controlled file manager written by Mieszko Lassota. You get tabs, incremental subsequence filtering everywhere (eg. ‘mp3’ matches…