Tag: productivity

Nerds Against Clutter: My Digital Downsizing Diary

Posted on by Morgan

Declutter and letting go.

  • Dropping Discord, Diaspora, Daily.dev, maybe Pixelfed and Mastodon next (done, by March 2024). Too buggy, too noisy.
  • Kissed Google Keep goodbye and embraced Obsidian even more, thanks to the Importer plugin.
  • Trying to escape the WhatsApp surveillance state. I'm axing useless groups left and right.
  • Scrubbing my old web presence. It's like digital housekeeping.
  • Using Syncthing now. Real-time sync across devices without cloud middlemen. Dropbox, you're on notice.
  • Deploying FDUPES for disk decluttering – it's a duplicate file slaughterhouse. Throwing inotifywait into the mix for smart folder monitoring, because who likes manual mess management?
  • Cut down on RSS. I've dropped Wallabag (done by November 2024). I'm still using Miniflux. and Shaarli with their weaknesses. Thinking about it. Bookmarking tools still suck somehow and I can't see a better alternative (yet) for my needs... yuck, so I'm working on my own thing, Tapas. Looking at the market for knowledge and bookmarks management tools, there is room for improvement in how we manage and consume information. Most of the hard work is on you for years with tools that connect to information.
  • Harnessing RSS-Bridge and Miniflux for streamlined info feeds. Using Changedetection for the unRSS-able stuff, i.e to monitor some indexes, lists, legal terms, release pages.
  • My tab hoarding was legendary, now capped at 18 with Tab Limiter. Browser zen achieved.
  • I have been known by my colleagues and partner to keep too many tabs open. My nerves cracked at reading other folks suffering same issue. So I decided to close a number of them, and limit each Window to 18 tabs with Tab Limiter.

Exploring and creating.

  • Blogging's up, but it's a discipline game. Need to turn Obsidian hoarding into public wisdom. Notebooks over phones, knowledge over scrolling.
  • Taming my Brave extension zoo with Context. It's like a digital bouncer for my browser. Funny, now I've more UX/Privacy oriented extensions than tabs.
  • Eyeing Geeqie to outsmart duplicate photos. Even my pixels need to be minimal.
  • cron jobs executing php scripts on a Cloudron LAMP instance is new digital butler, still a bit rough around the edges. Coding my own automation magic because their recipes are just appetizers for my needs.
  • Diving back into Rust. Cooking up something for productivity and knowledge management. Stay tuned.
  • And of course, some snowballs and video gaming to keep things balanced and fun.

To be continued.

Level your productivity up with your shell’s history and aliases

Posted on by Morgan

Days ago I came across a blog post teaching about using your shell's history more intensively to boost productivity. I wanted to reflect on my own usage, and share some of my tips and tricks.

Over the time, I created a lot of aliases useful to me, and I also reused some from the community. In the end I accumulate so much aliases that I can't remember them all πŸ™‚

I would spare keystrokes each time I use my favorite commands if I could remember the relevant aliases that would help me boosting my productivity :-), aliases which already exist on my local profile. Disclaimer: I'm bad a remembering them, my memory is full of other useless crap like passwords and movie quotes from pop culture.

Hence, I decided to develop a function to help identifying every possible undervalued aliases, based on my shell history. This function looks for the top commands I have used lastly and it lists aliases I could use to replace my commands and thus boost my productivity.

In my dotfiles, I named this function suggest_aliases.

Why is such function useful to me ? Let me explain with a concrete example:

In the past days or weeks, I frequently used some commands like git stash or ls -latr. Of course I have aliases for those commands, for instance the git plugin for Oh My Zsh provides useful aliases for git stash.

In this situation, my tool lists all the aliases matching to the commands I've given in my example above.

Here is a demo of the result it produces:

❯ suggest_aliases 30
==========  alias recommendations  ==========
 βœ” there is an alias for ls -latr :
 ➜ ltr='ls -latr'
 βœ” there is an alias for git stash :
 ➜ gsta='git stash push'
 ➜ gstaa='git stash apply'
 ➜ gstall='git stash --all'
 ➜ gstc='git stash clear'
 ➜ gstd='git stash drop'
 ➜ gstl='git stash list'
 ➜ gstp='git stash pop'
 ➜ gsts='git stash show --text'

This utility function returns several candidate aliases based on my recent commands usage. The parameter it takes is the size of the input data that is be used by the tool. The bigger the number, the more results are returned.

On a complementary note, Oh My Zsh includes the plugin alias-finder, which makes learning new aliases easier.

Example: 

$ alias-finder "git pull"
gl='git pull'
g=git

For my taste, I've a different workflow to find such aliases, which returns more results:

Example:

❯ ag "git pull"
ggpull='git pull origin "$(git_current_branch)"'
gl='git pull'
glum='git pull upstream master'
gup='git pull --rebase'
gupa='git pull --rebase --autostash'
gupav='git pull --rebase --autostash -v'
gupv='git pull --rebase -v'

where ag is an alias for 

alias | grep -i

In this case it returns the aliases provided by the git plugin for Oh My Zsh because that's what I get on my system. If I had created custom aliases for git pull, it would have listed them as well.

Finally, here is a demo of all the commands used previously πŸ˜‰

That's all, folks. I hope this was helpful πŸ˜‰ ! I would love to know if you get similar tips & tricks, if you do please share them πŸ™‚ .

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