Unsung Heroes of the Command Line
Since the command line is my primary way of interacting with my computer, I
often will take steps to optimize my usage of it. Most command line users know
the basics: ls, cd, grep, etc - these are instrumental building
blocks in using the command line. However, there are often more specialized
programs out there that can really save you some time, and I'd like to share a
few notable examples of these kinds of specialized programs that have made my
life easier over the last year or two. If you don't know them, hopefully
you'll find them useful; if you do know them, hopefully it will just
indicate that we both have good taste in our tools. =)
Posted on 2016-05-30
Elixir Adventures
For my Elixir Language of the Month project, I decided to return to my roots, in a way. You see, once upon a time, I wrote my first program. I had an idea for an space opera RPG, which, in retrospect, was a tacky Star Wars/Final Fantasy hybrid. Still, I wanted to bring that idea to life in any way I could; thus, I spent a good chunk of time my sophomore year of high school spewing out a morass of IFs and GOTOs in BASIC on my trusty TI-83+. Eventually, I did have a working game; it was a short text-based adventure, a sort of "demo" for the full game I had in my head.
Read More...Posted on 2016-05-23
Max Out Your Programming HP and MP With Elixir
Hello, and welcome back to the language of the month!. For April, I decided to try my hand at a language that's been very popular with the Ruby community, and is causing quite a stir in the Elm community. It's called Elixir!
Read More...Posted on 2016-05-09
Finding the other end of a pipe on Linux
Have you ever been using the command line and been looking at some colored
output, only to lose the coloration when you pipe the output to another
command? I often see this with ack something | less -R; you can force
coloration with ack --color or use ack's --pager option, but I've often
thought to myself "what if it were possible for a program to detect if the
other side of the pipe were capable of handling colored output?". Wouldn't it be cool
if ack could somehow discover that less -R was on the other side and automatically
enable color?
Posted on 2016-05-07
Too Many Maybes
I hang out in the Elm Slack channel from time to time, and people will often show up asking for help on their applications, ranging from questions about Elm's syntax to overall application design. One question that comes up pretty often is the right way to reduce the complexity of code like this:
Read More...Posted on 2016-04-15
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