Welcome

Here I keep technical notes on things that I have discovered or learned. While mostly for my own reference, I am making them public on the off chance that someone else also finds them useful.

These notes are written in a style that is very bare-bones. There is just enough context to tell you what you need to do, and nothing more. Consulting the official documentation may give you more context as to the history or "why" of a particular tool or technique.

Catppuccin admonitions and theme

To use mdbook with the theme seen on this site, please consult the catppuccin mdbook site

License

These notes are licensed under creative commons zero (CC0). You may reuse these notes for anything you wish. The code for these notes is open-source and may be found in this repository

Setting up mdBook

For full documentation see: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/index.html

Install

cargo install mdbook

To uninstall, run

cargo uninstall mdbook

Create a book

mdbook init my-first-book

Editing the book

All edits should be made in the src directory, and new notes should be created from the SUMMARY.md file, which should be present after initialization. Once the SUMMARY.md file is saved, and mdbook serve is fun, appropriate markdown files will automatically be created.

For example,

- [setting-up-mdbook](./setting-up-mdbook.md)

The markdown files themselves can be edited using any standard markdown syntax.

Git Base Commands

Cheatsheet

Commits

• Get the files in a commit git checkout
• Get difference from parent git show
• Merge with another commit git merge
• Look at parents git log

Staging

• See all changes that have yet to be committed git diff HEAD
• See all staged changes git git diff --cached

Branches

Branches consist of three things

1. A name (such as main, development, or a particular feature)
2. The latest commit
3. A reflog that shows how the branch has changed over time

To remove commits from a branch use git reset

The branch should be setup to display in the command prompt, or somewhere else within the development environment to reduce the risk of forgetting which branch you are commiting to.

The current branch is stored in .git/HEAD, and will either be a branch name, or a commit hash if you are in a detached HEAD state.

Detached HEAD States

You can end up in this state through three mechanisms, tag, tracking a remote branch, or checking out a particular commit of a remote.

Merges

There are three mechanisms for a merge:

1. Rebase
2. Merge
3. Squash

The biggest difference is that rebase will not create merge commits, while merge will. Squash is useful to combine multiple commits into one.

Remote

The remote can be any repository that is pulled/pushed from. It is usually hosted on a platform like GitHub or Codeberg. The configuration for the remote is stored in .gitconfig for the repository and consists of a name and url.

[remote 'origin']
url = "https://codeberg.org/mark-pitblado/notes.git"

Fix Diverged Remotes

1. Combine the changes through a merge mechanism covered above
2. Destroy local changes.

   git switch main
   git reset --hard origin/main
   

3. Throw away remote changes: git push --force

Undoing

git reset can be used to undo things.

Taking a local repository and publishing it

There are two basic steps.

1. The remote location needs to be created
2. The remote location needs to be setup as the remote origin for the local repository.

Creating a new repository on GitHub

Creating a new repository on Github can be done through the GUI. There is no need to setup a README.md, license etc, however a description can be added since this is not part of the repo itself.

Linking the local repository to the newly created GitHub repo

If the directory has not already been initialized with git, then running git init is needed. The commit message can of course be anything, but init seems somewhat standardized. Note that if a README.md or LICENSE.md was created, the -f (force) may be required on git push.

git init
git add -A
git commit -m 'init'
git remote add origin https://github.com/mark-pitblado/notes.git 
git push -u origin main

The above uses https to connect, however if ssh is desired, then the link would be replaced with something like git@github.com:mark-pitblado/notes.git.

lazygit

repository

Lazygit allows the use of a terminal user interface to perform git operations.

Installation

This can be used to install on Ubuntu

LAZYGIT_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/jesseduffield/lazygit/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[^"]*')
curl -Lo lazygit.tar.gz "https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/releases/latest/download/lazygit_${LAZYGIT_VERSION}_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz"
tar xf lazygit.tar.gz lazygit
sudo install lazygit /usr/local/bin

Commands

Instead of listing all the commands here, it is much easier to use ? from within the lazygit interface. This brings up the shortcuts for all keys. I will cover the top ones that I use.

How to setup a GPG key in Git

This page is going to assume that a key has already been created on the system and added to GitHub through the web interface.

To set the list of keys on the system

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long

To configure git to use the key

git config --global user.signingkey <keyid-from-step-above>

To set git to sign commits by default

git config --global commit.gpgsign true

To add the key to the .zshrc (or .bashrc)

#In ~/.zshrc
export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

If "keep my email private" has been enabled in GitHub, then the email associated with the key must match the no-reply email provided by GitHub.

Terminal Commands

cmp - Compares to see if two files are equivalent

Tmux

List active sessions

tmux ls

Kill a session

tmux kill-session -t session_id

Kill a process running on localhost

First, find the process using

lsof -i :3000

Then, kill the process via the PID

kill <PID> 

How to Insert a Unicode Character into the Terminal

To insert a unicode character in the terminal, press Ctrl + Shift + U then enter the code for the character you wish to enter. For example, the em-dash is U+2024. Hit enter once the number is typed out to see the character appear.

Create a new user with sudo ubuntu

Create the new user. Need to use sudo if not signed in as root.

adduser <newuser>

Give sudo priveleges

usermod -aG sudo <newuser>

SSH

Setup keypair with remote server

Create a key

ssh-keygen

Copying the public key to the server

ssh-keygen

Assumes that the user can authenticate with a password

ssh-copy-id username@remote_host

Manually

On client

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

On server

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
echo public_key_string >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Adding a key to the ssh-agent

For services like git, it may look to the ssh-agent to see that the appropriate key is present. To add a new key run

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/<keyname>

Useful keyboard shortcuts in firefox

Telescope

Find and Replace in Neovim

Current Line - First Occurrence

Where foo is what you want to replace and bar is what you want to replace it with. If what you need to search for uses / then | can be used a seperated instead.

:s/foo/bar/

Current Line - All Occurrences

:s/foo/bar/g

Entire File

:s%/food/bar

Remove Occurrences

:s%/foo//

Spell plugin

In neovim, to use the spell plugin enter:

:set spell

To cycle between incorrectly spelled words use ]s and [s. To see suggestions for an incorrectly spelled work, press =z (lowercase z).

For further reading:

• Neovim docs

Dictionaries

Snippets

Combine dictionary A and dictionary B without overwriting dictionary A's values with dictionary B's.

    for key, value in isle_mapping.items():
        if key in cart:
            cart[key].extend(value)
        else:
            cart[key] = value

Arrays

Snippets

Flatten an Array which may contain None values

def flatten(iterable):
    flattened_list = []
    for item in iterable:
        if isinstance(item, list):
            flattened_list.extend(flatten(item))
        elif item is not None: 
            flattened_list.append(item)
    return flattened_list

GNU Stow

Installation

On Mac

brew stow

On Linux (Debian)

sudo apt install stow

Usage

I currently use stow to manage dotfiles. First, create a directory ~/dotfiles and then navigatte into that directory. Then run the following to create the symlinks.

stow .

Ignoring files

Files that should not be synced by stow should be placed in .stow-local-ignore. This will prevent symlinks from being created. I use this for shell scripts that are used to install things but should not be synced up to my home directory. The formatting for this file is the same as .gitignore.

Starship

Starship is a fast command line prompt written in rust, compatible with bash, zsh and powershell (plus others)

Installtion

To install, you may use cargo or install directly using a .sh file.

cargo install starship --locked

Use

Simply place the following at the bottom of the .zshrc (or .bashrc etc) and reload the terminal.

eval "$(starship init zsh)"

Configuration

Create the configuration directory

mkdir -p ~/.config && touch ~/.config/starship.toml

Then make any cofiguration changes desired in that .toml file. A custom path can also be defined by setting a custom configuration directory

export STARSHIP_CONFIG=~/example/non/default/path/starship.toml

iamb

This is a rust command line tool for navigating matrix chats with vim motions

Installation

cargo install --locked iamb

Keybindings

See iamb.chat for full documentation

Zoxide

repo: https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

Summary

Zoxide is a tool that remembers previous paths that you have been to through cd, allowing you to more easily navigate between directories. It can be aliased to cd so that it essentially functions like a smarter version of the same command.

Installation

For zoxide itself cargo install zoxide --locked

For fzf sudo apt install fzf

Within .zshrc

eval "$(zoxide init --cmd cd zsh)"

Note that this will allow for the use of cd as normal, so that on systems that do not have zoxide installed, cd muscle memory is maintained.

Use

z foo              # cd into highest ranked directory matching foo
z foo bar          # cd into highest ranked directory matching foo and bar
z foo /            # cd into a subdirectory starting with foo

z ~/foo            # z also works like a regular cd command
z foo/             # cd into relative path
z ..               # cd one level up
z -                # cd into previous directory

zi foo             # cd with interactive selection (using fzf)

z foo<SPACE><TAB>  # show interactive completions (zoxide v0.8.0+, bash 4.4+/fish/zsh only)

Linked Documentation

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aghxkpyRVDY

Alacritty

Installation

Change font

Alacritty has all the configuration done in alacritty.toml. To change the font, just add the following after installing the font on the machine.

[font]
size = 14.0

[font.normal]
family = "Fira Mono Nerd Font"
style = "Medium"

UV

An extremely fast Python package installer and resolver.

Github repo: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Installation

pip install uv

Usage

Create a virtual environment

The following will create a virutal environment at .venv

uv venv

Activate virtual environment

source .venv/bin/activate 

Install packages into virtual environment

uv pip install flask

Syncthing

csvlens

An easy way to view csv files in the terminal.

Repository: https://github.com/YS-L/csvlens

Installation

It can be installed view cargo

cargo install csvlens

Usage

csvlens <filename>

Russ

Russ is a rust based tui for reading RSS feeds.

Repository

https://github.com/ckampfe/russ

Installation

cargo install russ --git https://github.com/ckampfe/russ

Usage

russ read

Cargo Update

Repository

A tool to automatically update all cargo installed tools on the system.

Usage

Install

cargo install cargo-update

Usage

Update all packages.

cargo install-update -a

Update cargo-install

cargo-update

Git Guardian

Scan for secrets in a git repo ggshield secret scan repo .

Upgrade existing installation

pip install --user --upgrade ggshield

vja

A command line interface for Vikunja

Source code: Gitlab

Installation

python -m pip install --user vja

Upgrade

python -m pip install --user vja --upgrade

Configuration

Set the following as the config file, vja.rc. Change the url to the instance url.

[application]
frontend_url=https://try.vikunja.io/
api_url=https://try.vikunja.io/api/v1

You can define a custom location for the config file. I have chosen ~/.config/vikunja. This needs to be set as an environment variable through .zshrc.