Grep and find aliases

Two quick bash functions to speed up name and content search on files. These are to be appended at ~/.bashrc file:

function gr { clear ; grep -rn $1 . ; }
function ff { clear ; find . -name "$1" ; }

Holy Grail CSS layout with overflow

This morning – yep, a Sunday morning – I needed to implement an HTML page with the Holy Grail layout. A quick search gave me dozens of implementations, but all of them broke apart when you trew a lot of content into the sections. Being fond of the Flexbox model, I quickly came with an implementation that had all the needed overflow control:

This implementation is also modular: if you don’t need any of the panels, just remove them – the layout will stay working. Also, the satellite panels can have fixed dimensions, see the commented values for width and height.

The funny part is that min-height: 0. It’s there for Firefox; without it, the overflow goes wild. Other interesting thing is the absence of the height: 100% to html and body elements, it’s not needed.

Disabling the useless npm package-lock.json

Recently I’ve updated npm to version 5 while working in one of my projects. Much to my dismay, a “package-lock.json” file started to appear, and I finally understood why I’ve seen this file commited in some projects lately.

But since this feature is basically a horrible idea, I started searching a way to permanently disable it. It looks like I’m not the only one who dislikes this, because I found this excellent post, which points to the solution:

npm set package-lock false

And any more “package-lock.json” files that appear in front of me will be summarily deleted.

Visual Studio Code settings

This morning I was setting up Visual Studio Code at a Lubuntu virtual machine, and after saving the keyboard shortcuts, I opened my current editor to get the settings. Since some of them I consider essential, I decided to publish them here, for further reference.

Simple minimalist JavaScript metronome

These days, when practicing guitar, I needed a metronome. Whey you type “metronome” on Google Search, it actually brings out a functional metronome – however it has no keyboard shortcut keys. So I decided to write a simple metronome, with keyboard keys, from scratch, to suit my needs.

Knowing the imprecision of JavaScript’s setTimeout function, I implemented a timer that adjusts itself each call, thus having a fairly reliable precision.

The code is so simple I decided not to create a GitHub repository, so I’m just sharing the whole source code here:

Git amend updating date and time

When commiting code on Git, very often I realize I forgot some little detail right after I end the commit operation. This is very annoying. Fortunately, we have the amend command. Recently I found a very cool trick to use with amend command: updating the date and time of the commit together with amend.

So, with those in hand, I’m now using a nice alias on my ~/.bashrc file:

alias gitamend='git commit --amend --date="$(date -R)"'

And my own memory faults are now easily addressed.

Trying out Git Subtree

Currently I have 5 projects on my computer which use WinLamb library. So far I’ve been keeping copies of the library directory on each project; these directories are kept in sync with FreeFileSync Portable. Although this approach works, it’s very cumbersome.

Since each project is versioned as a Git repository, and WinLamb itself is a Git repository on GitHub, I started searching for an alternative, and I choose Subtree over Submodule. Following is a summary of the commands I needed to do on my Windows 7 x64, using Git portable v2.13.1:

1. Remote

Add a remote with the path to the repository of the shared project:

git remote add otherproj --no-tags git@github.com:username/otherproj.git

Or if a local project:

git remote add otherproj --no-tags d:/stuff/otherproj

You can view the remotes with:

git remote -v

2. Subtree

Run the Subtree command:

git subtree add --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash

This will copy the library into the subdirectory and create a commit, with the hash in the message. It’s unnecessary, but you can provide a custom message for the subtree commit:

git subtree add --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash -m "Subtreeing otherproj."

3. Updating

To update your project with new library code:

git subtree pull --prefix otherproj otherproj master --squash

This leads us to a nice bash function to our ~/.bashrc file:

function gitsubtreepull { git subtree pull --prefix $1 $1 master --squash; }

Which eases our life when updating our Subtree library:

gitsubtreepull otherproj

So far this approach seems to the better than the old-fashioned directory sync, although it still feels a bit “loose”. I’m still avoiding pushing code from the local repository to the shared library; if I change something, I just copy the code to there, then I update the library repository itself.

Note: beware amending a commit on the remote library. The next time you try to update the dependency, it’s likely to get lost, and you’ll have to remove the subtree and add it again.