Creating Youtube Banner

Today, I was trying to create a banner for my (upcoming) YouTube channel. I used Canva to get started. It has a lot of templates to get started. This can be a rabbit hole 😄 But I finalized the one I liked. After customizing the template to my liking, I was ready to upload it to youtube. But .. Turns out, depending on the device where are watching YouTube, different parts of the banner are visible.

direnv with python

What is direnv direnv is a tool that allows you to change your environment based on the configuration in that folder. e.g. You can set different environment variables for different folders. The reason I revisited direnv is because for python project, we need to switch to different virtual environment each time we change a project. Wouldn’t it be nice if correct virtual environment was activated when you change to that directory

Helix: Vertical Selection and Edit

One of the workflows I used in vi/m over last 2 decades is : vertical selection and edit So much so that it is part of my muscle memory and I needed to learn the equivalent in helix. After some searching, I found it. Here are the steps: Go to the column you want to select. Press v to enter select mode. Select the column and to go down and up in the column selection use Shift-C or Alt-Shift-C You can repeat the Shift-c command using the numeric operator if needed, like 10-Shift-C to select the column 10 rows vertically.

Omakub : Lazyvim

As I wrote earlier, I skipped over neovim initially, but then got curious. I installed Neovim and configured it to use Lazyvim. I was blown away by how nice it is. My last serious affair with neovim was two years ago. 1 Lot has changed since then. Lazyvim wasn’t even born when I stopped using neovim 2 It is quite polished.3 The hotekys are mnemonic and intuitive (coming from doom emacs, at least)

Omakub : Pinta

While Omakub was mainly intended for developers (and thus has focus on terminal based programs like alacritty, zellij and neovim), it does come with few GUI programs. I think this is mainly because DHH was trying to switch to Linux as his primary machine, and requires some non-terminal tools. Choice of Pinta and Xournal app were interesting, so I installed both of them. I assumed Pinta to be MS Paint replacement.

→ Zellij Plugins : zellij-forgot ∞

I didn’t even know Zellij had such extensive plugin system.

I’m going to explore more of those in coming days.

Let me start with Zellij Forgot

While the main (original?) purpose was (I assume) to remember various Zellij Keybindings, it can be extended to remember anything. ¹

While default/out of the box config will load the existing keybindings, it is a bit weird. It shows things like Some(Down, None) which seems more of Rust internal code and may not be directly useful to the user.

Instead, (as the README suggested) I added my own “pairs” (This is also given in the README, I just copy/pasted it)

By default, this adds to the existing list.

Not what I wanted.

Luckily, adding "LOAD_ZELLIJ_BINDINGS" "false" to the config will disable automatic keybinding loading.

Read Paywalled Articles for free - at least some anyway

If you can afford, please pay! On the other hand, paying to read articles is expensive for you, here is an option (among many others, I’m sure) for you Install extension like Click to remove element from the Chrome Web Store. It works with others Chromium based browsers as well, like Edge, Vivaldi, Arc and many more 1 When you see a popup blocking the article, you can use extension like Click to remove element and remove the popup 😄

→ Omakub ∞

Yesterday, I came across this new script released by Basecamp.

The one-line pitch is:

Turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command.

This was started by DHH, but now has a lot of contributors.

Since I’m not on Ubuntu, I can’t directly use it. But I’m tempted to set up Ubuntu on a spare (?) machine just to try this out.

Since this is how DHH wanted his machine to be setup, it installs apps like Zoom and Signal etc among others.

But as the intro post says :

the heart of the pre-configuration lies in the terminal

Since I also spend a lot of time in the terminal on macOS, it was something I could try. Luckily, most of the tools are available for macOS too.

I really liked tokyo-night everywhere.

Here is what I have done so far.

1. Switched to Alacritty from Wezterm
2. Configured Alacritty and Zellij ¹ based on omakub config
3. Installed flameshot. Earlier, I used to use Zappy for annotating screenshots (To be shared with bug report or a fix.)
4. Installed eza replacement for ls I had tried exa - before eza was forked out of it since exa was unmaintained, and for some reason, forgot to install it when I reinstalled macOS recently.
5. Made same font as omakub my default for Alacritty

Things I did not install:

1. mise : I already use asdf, so I don’t see much use switching. mise also has task runner functionality, but I use just in place of make, so I’m good.
2. Neovim ² : Happy with Emacs and Helix. Thank you very much. Update
3. Lazygit : I tried to use it. But I couldn’t learnt the keybindings and felt like I can’t use it. For now, I’m happy with magit when in Emacs, and just plain ol’ terminal when writing in Helix
4. lazydocker seems interesting. I might try it when I need to interact with docker a lot
5. Typora: Since I use Helix for markdown (like these posts), I skipped that section of the demo video. omakub also installs VScode (which I already have) which can very easily be used for markdown, why an editor just for markdown ? It might make sense for DHH - who I assume writes lot more text than me.

Overall, this exploration was much fun.

fill-paragraph in Helix

Emacs 1 has this command fill-paragraph (Usually M-q) which will auto format long uneven lines to make them look even by adding a hard wrap. But I use helix for writing these blog entries. That is how I discovered reflow command in Helix. It is simple really Select the blocks of text you want to format (by typing x and repeating for as many line as you have). Then :reflow. That’s it!

macOS: How to render thin(ner) strokes in Alacritty

After going through omakub 1 and its source, I wanted to recreate it on macOS as much as possible. The first thing was to use Alacritty. I had tried it in the past, but moved to Wezterm. The reason I stopped was because there was no support for panes or tabs (which is by design) But now that I’m anyway using Zellij for that, I decided to give Alacritty another chance.