→ Stashpad ∞

I came across stashpad during this Stackoverflow podcast.

What caught my attention was when Cara mentioned

Everyone has untitled.txt open that they use every day

That is me!! 😆

It is really easy. Cmd + N to create a new empty file, and start typing. I use BBEdit for this. I’ve seen my colleagues use Sublime text I have also used Sublime text for exactly that and only that purpose for a long time, since it saves these unnamed files across reboots/application restarts. One less headache. I don’t have to think of what to name the file, where to save it, format (this is easy, I’ll just save it as .txt or .md)

Later I came across BBEdit, which does exactly same, so I switched. My workflow did not change.

Stashpad promises to make the same workflow better.

I have just installed it, and haven’t used it yet.

Ironically, I started typing my thoughts about Stashpad as a Stashpad note, with intention that I’ll copy this into a blog post “later”. But decided that why not directly write it as a blog ? 😆

How to find people to follow on Mastodon

After creating an account on Mastodon, next question was how to find people to follow ? 🤔 While mastodon has existed for a while, only recently it started getting attention. So lot of people you follow are not on Mastodon. Yet. I followed a couple of approaches. First, I searched for topics I am interested in. I started with Emacs and Ruby. Found a few accounts to follow. Then I literally searched find tweeple of mastodon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.