Understanding Mastodon

After Elon Musk’s takeover, there has been a lot of discussion about leaving twitter. TBH, I am not that active on twitter, and I am not sure if charging for blue tick affects me 😄 Yet, I have been burnt in past by having my data lost, because it was on someone else’s platform. I do not consider my tweets that valuable, yet it seems I should have a back up, just in case.

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I wanted to be able to post thoughts without title or any of the front matter for long time.

Now I can 🤞

Mindmaps in Emacs

I have been using Emacs for about 4+ years now, and I still find new things. One of the thing I discovered this week is ability to create mindmaps without leaving the comfort of Emacs 😄 This is made possible via PlantUML. Doom emacs makes it very easy to set it up. Enable plantuml in the init.el of your doom emacs config. M-x doom/reload (This will install the appropriate packages) M-x plantuml-download-jar (Make sure you have working java installation) doom/open-scratch-buffer org-mode (Not sure if this is needed, but better be explicit) Now create following in your scratch buffer that is already in plantuml mode.

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Emacs: How to exclude files when searching in a project

I use SPC / a lot to find stuff inside a project. Since starting on Ruby project, a lot of my search results, specifically the first ones are inside the spec file (which is test case in Ruby) I may want those instances as well, but more often than not, I prefer the search results in the source code before test cases. The project is huge, and I have to scroll a lot before I see non-spec code, which becomes tiresome.

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Rolf Potts and Richard Bach

This may seem like strange title for the post, compared to my other posts, and it is. In case you don’t know any of these gentlemen, both of them are writers. Rolf Potts is known for Vagabonding. Made (more) popular by Tim Ferriss. Richard Bach may be known for “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” to most people. But I’ve read a lot of his books. That does not look like they should be the topic of the same entry.

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Helix Open File on Side

When I am working on a project, it is highly likely that I would open other files from that project. In order to do that, in Helix I would do SPC F. This opens up file picker for that workspace. I can then either navigate using arrow keys, or most likely start typing the name of the file and the file will be highlighted. As a side benefit, the file is shown on the right pane as a preview.

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Rails Runner

Some days ago, I came across a requirement where I needed to run some rails code at the end of deployment. We use the Capistrano tool for the deployment, and it has great support for hooks like after 'deploy:published', 'some_task' Most of the examples show some system commands, since Capistrano is a deployment tool, and isn’t running rails. But I didn’t know that, being new to rails ecosystem. So at first, at just called a background job that needed to talk to third party system and get some data, once the rails server is up.

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Better Git Status With fzf.fish

Towards the beginning of the year, I had written about Fuzzy Search in fish For the better part of the year. I only used Ctrl-R functionality, that too occasionally. Then today, I came across the same again, and after going through the README, I noticed at least one more useful keybinding. git status normally would just list the modified files etc. To see what has changed, one needs to git diff <filename>

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Vim Keybindings for Helix

Helix is a great editor. I’m trying it more and more these days (Like this post is edited in helix) While shift from action->object to object->action in itself is big change (muscle memory), there are indeed other differences as well. Luckily, it is easy to add keybindings to helix. Turns out someone took this too far, and created a lot of keybindings to make helix more like Vim Refer to this for the entire config.

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Helix New Release (and how to go to the last line in a file)

Noticed that new version 22.08.1 of helix is now available. See this Upgrade via your preferred package manager. After the upgrade, used hx after a long time. I also signed up for the matrix channel. Turns out that is where all the action is. I’m member of (almost-dead-but-not-quite) Telegram group for a while. But matrix channel seems active. I got immediate reply to my query. Nice! My query was : How do I go to the last line of the buffer ?

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