Rediscovering Vim
Most people who know me and follow my open-source work are likely going to be surprised that I’m writing an article about Vim. After all, I’ve been a devout ...
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Emacs
Using use-package the right way
I recently wrote that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter and I got quite a lot of heat for it. I totally stand by everything I said there, but I acknowledge t...
Emacs Startup Time Doesn’t Matter
Every now and then I see people discussion one of the following:
neocaml: a new Emacs package for OCaml programming
I wasn’t an early adopter of TreeSitter in Emacs, as usually such big transitions are not smooth and the initial support for TreeSitter in Emacs left much to...
macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs
While I was setting up my new mac mini yesterday I noticed something interesting - Apple have stopped shipping the ancient Emacs 22.1 with macOS! As I was mo...
M-x Reloaded: The Second Golden Age of Emacs
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarell
Emacs: Dead and Loving It
What is dead cannot die. – A Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. Game of Thrones)
Setting up Emacs for OCaml Development
I’ve promised you articles about OCaml and here they come! The first order of business when learning a new programming language is to setup Emacs for effecti...
Modern Emacs: Redux
New is always better. – Barney Stinson
Commercial Emacs
Talking never moves anything in Emacs, never did, never will. 2021 Maintainer of GNU Emacs, who then proceeded to keep talking.
Who Needs Modern Emacs?
The tools we use have a profound (and devious) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities. — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Interactive Programming in a Nutshell Permalink
Today I came across this great summary of the concept of interactive programming:
Building Emacs from Source with pgtk
Yesterday the pure GTK (a.k.a. pgtk) feature branch was finally merged in Emacs’s master. In a recent article I mentioned I was super excited about it, becau...
Magit for VS Code
Today I’ve learned about edamagit, a super faithful port of Magit for VS Code. It looks pretty similar to Magit and even has the same keybindings as Magit (e...
Emacs is not a Proper GTK Application Permalink
I got reminded yesterday that Emacs is not a proper GTK application after installing Windows 11 to make use of its built-in support for Linux GUI apps runnin...
Emacs is a Lifestyle
Recently I came across this tweet about Emacs and its users:
Why Emacs: Redux
redux adjective brought back; resurgent: the Victorian era redux.
CIDER 0.9
CIDER 0.9 (a.k.a. “EuroCIDER”) is finally out and it’s our best release yet! (shocker, right?) It took a lot more time than I originally anticipated, but at ...
Projectile 0.12 released
Projectile 0.12 is finally out!
Introducing inf-clojure - a Better Basic Clojure REPL for Emacs
At Clojure/conj I had the chance to shake Rich Hickey’s hand and exchange a few words with him. When I asked him whether he currently uses CIDER or Cursive f...
A CIDER Unsession at Clojure/conj
I’ll be talking about the evolution of CIDER at the conj, but I won’t be able to show much (in terms of features) during my talk. Luckily, however, beside th...
The Road to CIDER 0.8
I’m planning to release the long overdue CIDER 0.8 at clojure/conj 2014. I’ll be giving a talk there that will be mostly about CIDER, so this seems like a pr...
clojure-mode 3.0
clojure-mode 3.0 is out!
The State of Some Emacs Packages for Clojure Development
There are quite a few packages in the “official” clojure-emacs GitHub organization, but many of them have been deprecated recently with the release of CIDER ...
CIDER 0.7
CIDER 0.7 is finally out and it’s an epic release! It’s without a doubt the most important release since the inception of the project about two years ago and...
Projectile 0.10 is out!
Projectile 0.10.0 is out!
WikEmacs lives on under new stewardship
Several months passed since I stated my intent to shutdown WikEmacs. While I still consider the project a failed experiment and stand by everything I wrote i...
RuboCop
After I launched the Ruby Style Guide I often received requests to create a tool enforcing the rules in the guide automatically.
Emacs Redux
I’ve recently launched a new blog dedicated to Emacs - Emacs Redux.
The WikEmacs Experiment is Over!
Less than an year ago amid a lot of turmoil I’ve started an alternative to EmacsWiki. The project took off to a great start, but quickly lost traction and no...
Emacs Tip #8: Manipulating Word Case
One operation that we have to do fairly often when editing text is manipulating the case of words. The most popular case manipulations are probably capitaliz...
Emacs Tip #7: Remap Return to Control in OS X
One of the major problems when using Emacs on OS X is not related to OS X itself - the problem has to do with the Mac’s hardware. Recent Mac keyboards(both l...
Emacs Tip #6: Remove variable & function definitions
From time to time you might want to void (unbind) a variable or a function definition in Emacs. Most often you’ll probably be dealing with variables created ...
Emacs on OS X
Prelude
guru-mode
Getting started with Emacs is hard. That’s a fact of life and you shouldn’t believe anyone telling you otherwise.
Emacs Support for the Slim Template Language
I’m mostly a Ruby on Rails developer these days and as such I’m pretty fond of the Slim template language. I’ve always hated HTML + ERB, since that evil duo ...
A True Emacs Knight
Here’s one true Emacs Knight (courtesy of my friend Gergana Stancheva).
MELPA - homebrew (Emacs Edition)
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the state of package management in Emacs. In that article I pointed out that on the side of package.el too much was ...
WikEmacs: The Other Emacs Wiki
I’d like to apologize to everyone insulted by my previous posts. Contrary to popular belief I acknowledge EmacsWiki’s contribution to the Emacs community. Ob...
Die EmacsWiki, Die!
Prelude
Emacs Tip #5: Save Buffers Automatically on Buffer or Window Switch
When I program in Java I usually leave the comfort of Emacs and use IntelliJ IDEA instead (for various reasons that are irrelevant to this post). IDEA has on...
Emacs Tip #4: Repeat Last Command
Some times you’d want to quickly repeat an Emacs command several times and most of the time it won’t have a convenient keybinding you can use to do this. Ent...
Color Theming in Emacs: Reloaded
Prelude
Solarized for Emacs
I’ve created a new port of the Solarized color theme for Emacs 24. While there is another existing port of the theme I’ve decided to into a separate directio...
Emacs Tip #3: Whitespace Cleanup
Good developers are very careful about the proper use of whitespace in their files - there should be no empty lines at the beginning of a file, no empty line...
Why Emacs?
Prelude
Emacs Tip #2: Open File in External Program
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to open the file you’re editing in Emacs in an external program. For instance - you might be editing some HTML file and you ...
Getting started with Emacs 24
Prelude
A peek at Emacs 24
Prelude
Emacs Tip #1: Set the default font in Emacs 23
Emacs 23.2 will pick up the default GNOME monospaced font, so if you’re a GNOME user - you’re basically covered. If you’re not - don’t worry.
A new Zenburn theme for Emacs
Zenburn is a popular colour theme for vim, developed by Jani Nurminen. It’s my personal belief (and probably that of many of its users I presume) that it’s o...
Emacs Dev Kit
During the past few months I’ve been working on a project to convert my vast Emacs configuration into something generally useful and self-contained that coul...
Accessing the menu bar in Emacs
Have you ever been wondering how to access the Emacs menu bar, when using Emacs in console mode? The answer is easy - press F10 or type M-x menu-bar-open(bot...
Emacs Configuration On GitHub
When you have applications, whose configuration is as complex as that of Emacs it’s always a good idea to store that configuration under version control so y...
Emulate the behaviour of Return+Shift(insert new line) from popular IDEs(IDEA, Eclipse) in Emacs
I’m very fond of the ability to insert a new line below the line I’m currently at, and to position the cursor at the beginning of that new line, offered by m...
Using Emacs for Rails development: The perfect setup
Lately, I’ve started digging more and more into Rails, preparing for the start of a Rails powered project. Although there are some IDEs offering decent Rails...
Ruby
Running Jekyll on Ruby 3.4
Yesterday I’ve installed the newly released Ruby 3.4, but this caused an issue with Jekyll:
Updating the Bundler Version Specified in Gemfile.lock
You might have noticed one change introduced with Bundler 2.3 - it now requires you to run the version of Bundler that’s specified in your Gemfile.lock.1 Thi...
Bad Ruby: Hash Value Omission
Ruby 3.1 was recently released and it features one major syntax addition - you can now omit values in hash literals and keyword arguments in certain cases.1 ...
Inspecting the Contents of a Ruby Gem
From time to time you’ll need to inspect the contents of a locally installed Ruby gem. For instance - I needed to check the contents of my Jekyll theme (mini...
Going Rogue
For many years I’ve enjoyed listening to programming podcasts - it’s the perfect way to make a commute a bit more fun and educational.1 RubyRogues was always...
RuboCop Logo
Meet RuboCop’s brand new official logo!
The Elements of Style in Ruby #14: Variable Interpolation
Most experienced Rubyists probably know that there are two ways to interpolate instance, class and global variables into strings.
Permalinks in the Ruby and Rails style guides
I’m happy to report that now you can use permalinks to the rules listed in the community Ruby and Rails style guides.
Find out where a rake task is defined
Have you ever wondered where a particular rake task is defined? Enter rake -W (introduced in rake 0.9):
The Elements of Style in Ruby #13: length vs size vs count
One of the problems newcomers to Ruby experience is that there are often quite a few ways to do same thing. For instance - you can obtain the number of items...
A list of deprecated stuff in Ruby
As APIs evolve it’s inevitable that portions of them will be deprecated. Generally it’s fairly easy to find out what’s deprecated, but for several reasons th...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #12: proc vs Proc.new
People are often confused about the fact that there are two ways to created procs in Ruby - via Kernel#proc and Proc.new. Let’s see them in action:
Using Ruby’s each_with_object
Sometimes we’d like to build a new collection object from the elements of another collection. One trivial example would be element occurrence counting, whic...
Regexp anchors in Ruby
Some Rubyists, when faced with the task of matching against the beginning or the end of a string, are prone to using ^ and $ in their regular expressions. Mo...
RuboCop 0.14: Beyond the Ruby Style Guide
Good news, everyone - RuboCop 0.14 was just released!
Using Ruby’s gsub with a hash
Recently we discussed how you can use String#gsub with a block. Today we’ll examine another somewhat unknown feature of the gsub method - the ability to supp...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #11: Invoking Lambdas/Procs
There are whopping 4 ways to invoke a lambda (or a proc) in Ruby:
Lambdas/Procs in Case Expressions
Most Rubyists know they can use literals, classes, ranges and regular expressions in the when branches of a case expression:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #10: In cryptic Perlisms we do not trust
For better or for worse Perl had significant influence over Ruby’s initial design. A lot of things were directly borrowed from Perl, but over the years the R...
A couple of useful extensions to Ruby’s Enumerable module
Ruby’s Enumerable module is pretty extensive, but from time to time I wish it had some extra methods, that are available in the standard libraries of other l...
Using Ruby’s gsub with a block
String#gsub is one of the most used Ruby methods in the wild. Just about every Ruby programmer knows about the method and uses it fairly regularly.
The Elements of Style in Ruby #9: Hash#has_key? and Hash#has_value? are deprecated
One can often find similar code in the wild:
Announcing the Powerpack library
Powerpack is a small Ruby library containing (at this point) a few extensions to some core Ruby classes. I guess that in a way one can say it’s something lik...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #8: Know Thy Predicates
I often see people writing code like this:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #7: The case against ===
Today we’ll discuss the following section from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #6: Attributes Redux
Today we’ll talk about attributes in Ruby.
The Elements of Style in Ruby #5: Readability of long numeric literals
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
RuboCop 0.9 is now patrolling the streets!
RuboCop 0.9 is finally out! This was one of our most ambitious releases - over a month of work, ~250 commits, lots of new cops and features and a lot less bu...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #4: Array#join vs Array#*
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #3: Make sure something is an array
The subject of today’s post is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #2: Favor sprintf(format) over String#%
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #1: Maximum line length
Welcome to the first installment of The Elements of Style in Ruby.
The Elements of Style in Ruby: An Essay in N parts
The Ruby Style Guide is nearing its second birthday. The project has gained more attention and more traction than I could have imagined. For the millionth ti...
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out, support for JRuby and Rubinius is in!
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out!
RuboCop 0.6.0 released
RuboCop 0.6.0 was just released! It’s RuboCop’s biggest and most ambitious release yet!1 Here are the highlights: Fun fact - the entire rele...
RuboCop
After I launched the Ruby Style Guide I often received requests to create a tool enforcing the rules in the guide automatically.
Dealing with SSL certificate validation errors in Rails
I often see this question asked - “I’m getting the following error
Rails Tip #1: Use Pry Instead of irb for the Rails Console
This tip is going to be a really short one. Hopefully by now you’ve heard about pry - a fantastic irb replacement, that somewhat reminds me of the mighty Lis...
Ruby Tip #3: Matching on an Object’s Class in a Case Expression
From time to time you might want to take different actions depending on an object’s class. One handy way to do so is with a case expression:
Setting up fallback locale(s) in Rails 3
I18n(internationalization) and l10n(localization) are topics that are covered superbly by the Rails Guides. The one thing that’s left out is the setup of fal...
Ruby Tip #2: Get a List of All Rake Tasks
Many people are having trouble remembering all the rake tasks defined in a particular project’s Rakefile (especially if they hadn’t authored it). This is qui...
Ruby Tip #1: Demystifying the Difference Between == and eql?
Newcomers to Ruby are often confused by the fact the Object class defines three methods related to equality - ==, eql? and equal?. Of the three the one that ...
Recommended Ruby books
Prelude
Ruby or Python?
Disclaimer
The best way to implement the Singleton pattern in Java and Ruby
I haven’t posted anything lately, but I just received my brand new Das Keyboard and now I simply can’t stop typing. Recently I’ve been going through some eff...
Using Emacs for Rails development: The perfect setup
Lately, I’ve started digging more and more into Rails, preparing for the start of a Rails powered project. Although there are some IDEs offering decent Rails...
Meta
40
Life is a long lesson in humility. – James M. Barrie
The Story of a Nickname
Note: This article was originally published on “HEY World” on Sep 30, 2021. I’m moving it to my main blog, as I’ve decided to close my HEY account.
Bluesky
Remember me trying out Mastodon a while ago? Well, it didn’t stick. For various reasons.
2023: The Year in Review
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Søren Kierkegaard
A Bad Year for Blogging
Last year (2022) I celebrated a rather unexpected all time blogging record. As it often happens in such cases, however, there was a massive drop in my bloggi...
Blog Comments are Back
This is going to be one super short post.
2022: The Year in Review
Another year is behind us and it’s time for the obligatory “year in review” blog post. I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, that’s why I’m getting to writing it a b...
Bozhidar is on Mastodon
Twitter these days is all about drama related to… Twitter (Elon Musk). That really pains me, given that as long as it has existed Twitter has been the only s...
Topic-specific RSS Feeds
Someone complained earlier today that my Pixel 6A article was picked up by Planet Emacslife. While I wasn’t involved in adding my blog there and I never prom...
An Unexpected Blogging Record
Today I’ve noticed that I’ve written 36 articles to date here, which beats my previous annual record of 34 articles from 2011. I definitely didn’t see this c...
Why Bother with a Custom Desktop PC in 2022?
Many people are quite surprised when I tell them that my primary computer is a custom-built desktop PC, that I assembled myself. After all, desktops have bee...
Lessons Learned from a Hardware Upgrade Gone Wrong
Yesterday I had a very frustrating start of my day for the most unexpected of reasons - a (supposedly) simple CPU cooler upgrade for my desktop computer turn...
A Note About “Guest” Posts
Pretty often I receive emails like this one:1 Today I got three of those, which inspired me to write this short article. ↩
Modern Emacs: Redux
New is always better. – Barney Stinson
Back in Action
May you live in interesting times. – an old Chinese curse
Having Fun with Custom Domains for Email
A reader ask me recently how do I use custom domains for my email needs and I promised to write a short blog post about this. Promised fulfilled!
Email Mania
I love email! Shocker, right? Especially in this day and age, that are dominated by social media and instant messengers. I’ve got my reasons for this and I’v...
Thinking & Writing
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. – Leslie Lamport
The War in Ukraine
That’s one article I’ve really struggled to write. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been totally consumed by the horrible war in Ukraine. For many years I believed ...
Titanium Edition
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music and the role it played in my life over the years. I think I’ve been pretty passionate about music ever since I di...
Reader’s Block
Today I finished reading a book for the first time in a couple of months. As a matter of fact - I barely did any reading in the past couple of months. That r...
My Writing Process
While working on my year in review article for 2021 I once again realized that my writing process is very similar to my programming process.1 Simply put - it...
2021: The Year in Review
Celebrate endings – for they precede new beginnings. – Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Experimenting with Link Posts Permalink
17 years ago the famous blogger John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, introduced the concept of a “link log”/”linkblog”:1 I’ve always thought...
No Hello Permalink
I’ve always hated filler chat/email messages like “Hello! How are you doing?”, so I’m very glad we have sites like nohello.net where we can point people who ...
Advent of Code 2021
I love programming puzzles, even if I’ve never been particularly good at solving them. For me they were always a good way to gain some practice with a new pr...
Small Improvements to the Blog
After switching (think) to Minimal Mistakes I’ve been doing some small improvements to the site’s structure and content. I thought it might be a good idea to...
.net Forever
Let’s talk a bit about .net. No, not Microsoft’s .NET, but the other .net - one of the original top-level internet domains. Given how popular .com has become...
Your Name is Your Brand
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
A Note About Recruiters
Yesterday I got yet another completely absurd cold email from an incompetent technical recruiter:
Blog Comments are Dead
Here’s one random observation - (almost) nobody comments directly on blog posts these days. It seems that all the conversations happen somewhere else - Reddi...
Getting in Touch
From time to time people ask me what’s the best way to get in touch with me, as there are way too many options.
HEY
That’s going to be one really short post. I just wanted to share with you that I’ve been using HEY (a new e-mail service from Basecamp) for the past few mon...
Meta Redux
This site was my first attempt to write. I failed miserably and I produced some pretty crappy content, but I also learned a lot in the process.
Going Rogue
For many years I’ve enjoyed listening to programming podcasts - it’s the perfect way to make a commute a bit more fun and educational.1 RubyRogues was always...
Back in Black
Back in black, I hit the sack I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back Yes, I’m let loose From the noose That’s kept me hanging about I’ve been lookin...
Looking Back on 2013
2013 was a good year for me in many aspects. I’ll share here some of the programming-related achievements of mine over the year that made me somewhat proud o...
Long Time, No See
It’s been quite a while since my last blog post. There hasn’t been much action on the open-source projects I happen to maintain either. The reason for this i...
Why Emacs?
Prelude
Every blog has its first post…
Every Generation Has A Legend. Every Journey Has A First Step. Every Saga Has A Beginning. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Trailer
OCaml
The origin of the pipeline operator (|>)
These days a lot of programming languages (especially those leaning towards functional programming) offer a pipeline operator (|>), that allows you to fee...
Learning OCaml: Module Aliases
OCaml is famous for allow you to do a lot of things like modules. Like really a lot! Advanced features like functors, aside, it’s really common to either ali...
Learning OCaml: Parsing Data with Scanf
In my previous article I mentioned that OCaml’s Stdlib leaves a lot to be desire when it comes to regular expressions. One thing I didn’t discuss back then w...
Learning OCaml: Regular Expressions
One of the things that bothered me initially in OCaml was the poor support for working in regular expressions in the standard library. Technically speaking, ...
Why F#?
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career...
OCaml’s Standard Library (Stdlib)
Every programming language comes with some “batteries” included - mostly in the form of its standard library. That’s typically all of the functionality that’...
neocaml: a new Emacs package for OCaml programming
I wasn’t an early adopter of TreeSitter in Emacs, as usually such big transitions are not smooth and the initial support for TreeSitter in Emacs left much to...
Learning OCaml: Functions without Parameters
A couple of days ago I noticed on OCaml’s Discord server that someone was confused by OCaml function applications (invocations) like these:
Learning OCaml: Matching Anything or the Lack of Anything
I’ve noticed that some newcomers to OCaml are a bit confused by code like the following:
Simple Ways to Run OCaml Code
When people think of OCaml they are usually thinking of compiling code to a binary before they are able to run it. While most OCaml code is indeed compiled t...
OCaml Adds List.take and List.drop
One of my small issues with OCaml is that the standard library is quite spartan. Sometimes it misses functions that are quite common in other (similar) langu...
Learning OCaml: Verifying tail-recursion with @tailcall
How can you be sure that an OCaml function you wrote is actually tail-recursive? You can certainly compile the code and look at the generated assembly code, ...
Learning OCaml: Quoted String Literals
While learning OCaml I’ve noticed one curious feature - it has two types of string literals. The first type are the common and quite familiar “double-quoted ...
How are OCaml Programmers Called?
Ruby programmers are commonly called Rubyists. Python programmers are often called Pythonistas. Lisp programmers are widely known as Lispers. Clojure program...
Reading Files in OCaml
One thing I’ve noticed on my journey to learn OCaml was that reading (text) files wasn’t as straightforward as with many other programming languages. To give...
OCaml Tips: Implementing a range Function
Lots of programming languages have some built-in range functionality, that’s typically used to generate a list/array of integer numbers. Here are a couple of...
OCaml Tips: Converting a String to a List of Characters
While playing with OCaml I was surprised to learn there’s no built-in function the convert a string to a list of its characters. Admittedly, that’s not somet...
Zipping Collections in OCaml
Many programming languages have a function for combining the elements of multiple collections (e.g. arrays or lists) together. Typically this function is nam...
OCaml at First Glance
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
OCaml Tips: Multiple Let Bindings
One thing that was a bit weird for me in OCaml early on was how to introduce multiple let bindings (e.g. in the body of a function definition). Think somethi...
Setting up Emacs for OCaml Development
I’ve promised you articles about OCaml and here they come! The first order of business when learning a new programming language is to setup Emacs for effecti...
Learning OCaml
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Mahatma Gandhi
Tips
Replace Text in Multiple Files
Today I wanted to update a bit markup in my blog and it took me some time to get it right. Basically I wanted to replace the language in some fenced code blo...
Git Tip: Find the Top Contributors
From time to time it’s useful to know who are main authors of some piece of a project. Admittedly most of the time I want to check who are the top contribut...
OCaml Tips: Implementing a range Function
Lots of programming languages have some built-in range functionality, that’s typically used to generate a list/array of integer numbers. Here are a couple of...
OCaml Tips: Converting a String to a List of Characters
While playing with OCaml I was surprised to learn there’s no built-in function the convert a string to a list of its characters. Admittedly, that’s not somet...
Oh My Zsh: Fun with Take
Today I’ve noticed that Oh My Zsh provides one really useful command (implemented as a shell function) - take. I guess with a name like this it’s not immedia...
Reload Zsh Configuration
I’ve been using Zsh on-and-off for a very long time (15+ years), but I still occasionally learn something new about it.1 Yesterday I was setting up oh-my-zsh...
OCaml Tips: Multiple Let Bindings
One thing that was a bit weird for me in OCaml early on was how to introduce multiple let bindings (e.g. in the body of a function definition). Think somethi...
Display Git Configuration
From time to time I tend to forget what’s my effective Git configuration, so I have to check it somehow. Most of the time I’d simply do the following:1 ...
Inspecting the Contents of a Ruby Gem
From time to time you’ll need to inspect the contents of a locally installed Ruby gem. For instance - I needed to check the contents of my Jekyll theme (mini...
Ubuntu Tip: Removing All Packages Installed from a PPA
PPAs (Personal Package Archives) are a popular way to install pre-built packages that for some reason are not (yet) available in Ubuntu’s standard package re...
If I Could Turn Back (Git) Time
If only there was an easy way to find the first commit in a Git repository… A bit of Googling unveils some pretty hard to remember incantations like:
Emacs Tip #8: Manipulating Word Case
One operation that we have to do fairly often when editing text is manipulating the case of words. The most popular case manipulations are probably capitaliz...
Emacs Tip #7: Remap Return to Control in OS X
One of the major problems when using Emacs on OS X is not related to OS X itself - the problem has to do with the Mac’s hardware. Recent Mac keyboards(both l...
Emacs Tip #6: Remove variable & function definitions
From time to time you might want to void (unbind) a variable or a function definition in Emacs. Most often you’ll probably be dealing with variables created ...
Rails Tip #1: Use Pry Instead of irb for the Rails Console
This tip is going to be a really short one. Hopefully by now you’ve heard about pry - a fantastic irb replacement, that somewhat reminds me of the mighty Lis...
Ruby Tip #3: Matching on an Object’s Class in a Case Expression
From time to time you might want to take different actions depending on an object’s class. One handy way to do so is with a case expression:
Emacs Tip #5: Save Buffers Automatically on Buffer or Window Switch
When I program in Java I usually leave the comfort of Emacs and use IntelliJ IDEA instead (for various reasons that are irrelevant to this post). IDEA has on...
Ruby Tip #2: Get a List of All Rake Tasks
Many people are having trouble remembering all the rake tasks defined in a particular project’s Rakefile (especially if they hadn’t authored it). This is qui...
Emacs Tip #4: Repeat Last Command
Some times you’d want to quickly repeat an Emacs command several times and most of the time it won’t have a convenient keybinding you can use to do this. Ent...
Ruby Tip #1: Demystifying the Difference Between == and eql?
Newcomers to Ruby are often confused by the fact the Object class defines three methods related to equality - ==, eql? and equal?. Of the three the one that ...
Linux
My favorite tilde keybindings
I’m a big fan of the ~ (tilde) key and I make heavy use of it every day. That’s why I’ve never been fond of keyboards that move its position for whatever rea...
How to Find Which Package a File Belongs to in Debian/Ubuntu
Occasionally I need to figure out which Debian package some file comes from (e.g. because I want to remove a redundant package or find related packages). The...
Working with Multiple Versions of Java on Ubuntu
Today I encountered a bug that was specific to JDK 16 on a project I was working on, and I needed to switch back my Java version to something older. I reali...
Rename Multiple Files in Linux
From time to time we need to rename a bunch of files according to some pattern. One simple example that comes to mind is that recently I noticed that some a...
Ubuntu Tip: Removing All Packages Installed from a PPA
PPAs (Personal Package Archives) are a popular way to install pre-built packages that for some reason are not (yet) available in Ubuntu’s standard package re...
From Linux to OS X: 1 Year Later
Prelude
The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II
Read this with an open mind.
Emacs Tip #1: Set the default font in Emacs 23
Emacs 23.2 will pick up the default GNOME monospaced font, so if you’re a GNOME user - you’re basically covered. If you’re not - don’t worry.
Running Xerox Phaser 3117 under Fedora 15
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for quite some time now and a Fedora user for just as long. The first distribution that I ever used was Fedora 2 and even though I...
Enabling 3D support for Nouveau in Fedora 13
Most of you probably have heard that Fedora 13 will feature experimental 3D support for the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards. This support, howeve...
Accessing the menu bar in Emacs
Have you ever been wondering how to access the Emacs menu bar, when using Emacs in console mode? The answer is easy - press F10 or type M-x menu-bar-open(bot...
Automatically execute programs after zsh login
Sometimes you may want to start a couple of programs just after an interactive login to your favourite shell, which in my case would be zsh.
Using Xerox Phaser 3117 on Fedora
The driver selected by default by Fedora 11 is not appropriate for Xerox Phaser 3117 - it will not print with it. However there is a very easy solution to th...
Find out quickly which package provides a certain library with YUM
One of the most dreaded things that you can see while trying to run some application or trying to install an rpm package is a message saying that some requir...
A nice zsh prompt
Recently I switched to zsh, after being a bash user for almost 5 years. I was in love with everything in zsh from day one, except one thing – the default pro...
Clojure
OCaml at First Glance
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Clojure Tricks: Number to Digits
If you’re into programming puzzles you probably know that there’s a whole class of problems about doing something (e.g. some calculations) with the digits of...
Clojure Tricks: Zipping Things Together
Many programming languages have a function for combining the elements of multiple collections (e.g. arrays or lists) together. Typically this function is nam...
Clojure Tricks: Replace in String
Today I saw a clever bit of Clojure code involving clojure.string/replace, that reminded me how powerful the Clojure standard library is. I guess pretty much...
Interactive Programming in a Nutshell Permalink
Today I came across this great summary of the concept of interactive programming:
Advent of Code 2021
I love programming puzzles, even if I’ve never been particularly good at solving them. For me they were always a good way to gain some practice with a new pr...
CIDER 0.9
CIDER 0.9 (a.k.a. “EuroCIDER”) is finally out and it’s our best release yet! (shocker, right?) It took a lot more time than I originally anticipated, but at ...
Introducing inf-clojure - a Better Basic Clojure REPL for Emacs
At Clojure/conj I had the chance to shake Rich Hickey’s hand and exchange a few words with him. When I asked him whether he currently uses CIDER or Cursive f...
A CIDER Unsession at Clojure/conj
I’ll be talking about the evolution of CIDER at the conj, but I won’t be able to show much (in terms of features) during my talk. Luckily, however, beside th...
The Road to CIDER 0.8
I’m planning to release the long overdue CIDER 0.8 at clojure/conj 2014. I’ll be giving a talk there that will be mostly about CIDER, so this seems like a pr...
clojure-mode 3.0
clojure-mode 3.0 is out!
SICP Distilled
SICP Distilled is one of the most interesting Kickstarter projects I’ve seen in a while.
The State of Some Emacs Packages for Clojure Development
There are quite a few packages in the “official” clojure-emacs GitHub organization, but many of them have been deprecated recently with the release of CIDER ...
CIDER 0.7
CIDER 0.7 is finally out and it’s an epic release! It’s without a doubt the most important release since the inception of the project about two years ago and...
Permalinks in the Clojure style guide
I’m happy to report that now you can use permalinks to the rules listed in the community Clojure style guide as well.
Just juxt it!
juxt is one remarkably useful core Clojure function, that doesn’t seem to be widely used (or understood for that matter), but is part of the arsenal of every...
drop-nth in Clojure
For some reason the standard Clojure library doesn’t have a drop-nth function (although it has take-nth). Luckily implementing it is trivial:
Style
The Elements of Style in Ruby #14: Variable Interpolation
Most experienced Rubyists probably know that there are two ways to interpolate instance, class and global variables into strings.
The Elements of Style in Ruby #13: length vs size vs count
One of the problems newcomers to Ruby experience is that there are often quite a few ways to do same thing. For instance - you can obtain the number of items...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #12: proc vs Proc.new
People are often confused about the fact that there are two ways to created procs in Ruby - via Kernel#proc and Proc.new. Let’s see them in action:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #11: Invoking Lambdas/Procs
There are whopping 4 ways to invoke a lambda (or a proc) in Ruby:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #10: In cryptic Perlisms we do not trust
For better or for worse Perl had significant influence over Ruby’s initial design. A lot of things were directly borrowed from Perl, but over the years the R...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #9: Hash#has_key? and Hash#has_value? are deprecated
One can often find similar code in the wild:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #8: Know Thy Predicates
I often see people writing code like this:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #7: The case against ===
Today we’ll discuss the following section from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #6: Attributes Redux
Today we’ll talk about attributes in Ruby.
The Elements of Style in Ruby #5: Readability of long numeric literals
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #4: Array#join vs Array#*
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #3: Make sure something is an array
The subject of today’s post is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #2: Favor sprintf(format) over String#%
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide:
The Elements of Style in Ruby #1: Maximum line length
Welcome to the first installment of The Elements of Style in Ruby.
Java
Working with Multiple Versions of Java on Ubuntu
Today I encountered a bug that was specific to JDK 16 on a project I was working on, and I needed to switch back my Java version to something older. I reali...
Java.next() - The Groovy Programming Language
Java.next()
Incremental development with Scala and JRebel
One of the things I love most about Lisp development is the ability to develop applications in an incremental interactive manner - you write one function, co...
Changing the look & feel in NetBeans 6.8
Recently I’ve been trying to switch my work environment theme to something with lower contrast (namely the excellent Zenburn theme). Swing applications, howe...
How to enable font anti-aliasing in a Java Swing app
If you have access to the source, you can do this in the main method:
How to center a JDialog over a JFrame in Swing
I always thought that the fact that JDialogs accepted a parent frame as a constructor argument was the thing, that would make the dialog’s position relative ...
Mofidy JVM parameters for JBoss AS
Most people have been in a situation requiring them to change one or more of the parameters passed to the JVM on top of which JBoss AS is running. For instan...
Java type indicators in Eclipse
One of the things that I don’t like about the default Eclipse settings for Java development is that in the package explorer all Java files appear in the same...
A switch on String idiom for Java
I’ve always been frustrated with the inability to write a switch on String in Java. However the enum type introduced in Java 5.0 somewhat diminishes the iss...
The best way to implement the Singleton pattern in Java and Ruby
I haven’t posted anything lately, but I just received my brand new Das Keyboard and now I simply can’t stop typing. Recently I’ve been going through some eff...
Jekyll
Running Jekyll on Ruby 3.4
Yesterday I’ve installed the newly released Ruby 3.4, but this caused an issue with Jekyll:
Topic-specific RSS Feeds
Someone complained earlier today that my Pixel 6A article was picked up by Planet Emacslife. While I wasn’t involved in adding my blog there and I never prom...
Changes to GitHub Pages
Today I’ve noticed that updates to my site resulted in GitHub Pages deployment errors, even though everything was working fine locally with jekyll --serve an...
Experimenting with Link Posts Permalink
17 years ago the famous blogger John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, introduced the concept of a “link log”/”linkblog”:1 I’ve always thought...
A Decade with Jekyll
2021 is the year of anniversaries for me:
Atom Feeds in Jekyll: Redux
It’s been over a decade since I’ve started using Jekyll and I’m still struggling with setting up Atom feeds there. Perhaps this happens mostly, because I rar...
Switching to Minimal Mistakes
Today I’ve switched the blog’s theme from Hydeout to Minimal Mistakes. I did so for several reasons:
Farewell Disqus
Just wanted to let you know that for various reasons I’ve migrated the comments of (think) from Disqus to Hyvor Talk. I’ve described the process in a dedicat...
Migrating from Octopress to Jekyll
After dreading the migration of this site from Octopress 2 to Jekyll for years, I finally found the will to do it today. The process was actually very straig...
Octopress 3.0
Can’t wait for Octopress 3.0 to be released! Octopress 2 is killing me and I was seriously considering going back to a plain Jekyll blog, before I saw 3.0 is...
Add an Atom feed to a Jekyll blog
As you know I’ve recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. One of the things I had to do was add an Atom feed (RSS sucks). It was quite the easy ta...
Moving from WordPress to Jekyll
This is my first post after a very long hiatus partially induced by a migration of my blog from WordPress to Jekyll, which I started half an year ago and nev...
Hardware
Back to Android: My Take on the Pixel 6A
A couple of weeks ago I made a spectacular and quite unexpected return to Android, after a long period of being exclusively in Apple’s mobile devices ecosyst...
Why Bother with a Custom Desktop PC in 2022?
Many people are quite surprised when I tell them that my primary computer is a custom-built desktop PC, that I assembled myself. After all, desktops have bee...
Lessons Learned from a Hardware Upgrade Gone Wrong
Yesterday I had a very frustrating start of my day for the most unexpected of reasons - a (supposedly) simple CPU cooler upgrade for my desktop computer turn...
New Laptop: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7
A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new laptop to replace my old MacBook 12-inch from 2017. As my followers might remember I was planning to buy either an ...
The MacBook: Redux
I wonder how many people remember the 12-inch MacBook that Apple introduced to much fanfare in 2015. It was supposed to be the future of computing, a super t...
Running Xerox Phaser 3117 under Fedora 15
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for quite some time now and a Fedora user for just as long. The first distribution that I ever used was Fedora 2 and even though I...
Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
Prelude
Enabling 3D support for Nouveau in Fedora 13
Most of you probably have heard that Fedora 13 will feature experimental 3D support for the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards. This support, howeve...
Using Xerox Phaser 3117 on Fedora
The driver selected by default by Fedora 11 is not appropriate for Xerox Phaser 3117 - it will not print with it. However there is a very easy solution to th...
Das Keyboard
Every professional developer knows how important to the development process the keyboard is, so it is only natural to be on the look for some quality piece o...
Rails
Dealing with SSL certificate validation errors in Rails
I often see this question asked - “I’m getting the following error
Rails Tip #1: Use Pry Instead of irb for the Rails Console
This tip is going to be a really short one. Hopefully by now you’ve heard about pry - a fantastic irb replacement, that somewhat reminds me of the mighty Lis...
Setting up fallback locale(s) in Rails 3
I18n(internationalization) and l10n(localization) are topics that are covered superbly by the Rails Guides. The one thing that’s left out is the setup of fal...
Emacs Support for the Slim Template Language
I’m mostly a Ruby on Rails developer these days and as such I’m pretty fond of the Slim template language. I’ve always hated HTML + ERB, since that evil duo ...
Using Emacs for Rails development: The perfect setup
Lately, I’ve started digging more and more into Rails, preparing for the start of a Rails powered project. Although there are some IDEs offering decent Rails...
Tutorials
Working with Multiple Versions of Java on Ubuntu
Today I encountered a bug that was specific to JDK 16 on a project I was working on, and I needed to switch back my Java version to something older. I reali...
Atom Feeds in Jekyll: Redux
It’s been over a decade since I’ve started using Jekyll and I’m still struggling with setting up Atom feeds there. Perhaps this happens mostly, because I rar...
Basic Git Setup
Every time I change my computer or my operating system1, one of the first things I have to do is to configure Git. This article simply covers the basic Git s...
Rename Multiple Files in Linux
From time to time we need to rename a bunch of files according to some pattern. One simple example that comes to mind is that recently I noticed that some a...
Migrating from Octopress to Jekyll
After dreading the migration of this site from Octopress 2 to Jekyll for years, I finally found the will to do it today. The process was actually very straig...
Ruby or Python?
Disclaimer
One shell to rule them all…
Prelude
Add an Atom feed to a Jekyll blog
As you know I’ve recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. One of the things I had to do was add an Atom feed (RSS sucks). It was quite the easy ta...
Curbing My Email Mania
In the end, there can be only one. – Highlander
Fastmail: Year Two
Here’s a small follow-up to my usage of Fastmail that started in 2021. In a nutshell - little has changed since my previous update. Fastmail is still my favo...
Dealing with Unwanted Email
It’s no secret that I love email. One of the great things about email addresses is that they are public and that everyone can get in touch with you this way....
Fastmail: Year One
A little bit over a year ago I switched from Gmail to Fastmail for my personal email. Looking back, I couldn’t be happier with my decision. The more I’ve use...
Having Fun with Custom Domains for Email
A reader ask me recently how do I use custom domains for my email needs and I promised to write a short blog post about this. Promised fulfilled!
Email Mania
I love email! Shocker, right? Especially in this day and age, that are dominated by social media and instant messengers. I’ve got my reasons for this and I’v...
Farewell, G Suite legacy free edition
Today I saw the news that Google are pulling on the plug on the G Suite legacy free edition (a.k.a. Google Apps for custom domains). If you don’t recall the ...
HEY
That’s going to be one really short post. I just wanted to share with you that I’ve been using HEY (a new e-mail service from Basecamp) for the past few mon...
Learning OCaml
Learning OCaml: Module Aliases
OCaml is famous for allow you to do a lot of things like modules. Like really a lot! Advanced features like functors, aside, it’s really common to either ali...
Learning OCaml: Parsing Data with Scanf
In my previous article I mentioned that OCaml’s Stdlib leaves a lot to be desire when it comes to regular expressions. One thing I didn’t discuss back then w...
Learning OCaml: Regular Expressions
One of the things that bothered me initially in OCaml was the poor support for working in regular expressions in the standard library. Technically speaking, ...
OCaml’s Standard Library (Stdlib)
Every programming language comes with some “batteries” included - mostly in the form of its standard library. That’s typically all of the functionality that’...
Learning OCaml: Functions without Parameters
A couple of days ago I noticed on OCaml’s Discord server that someone was confused by OCaml function applications (invocations) like these:
Learning OCaml: Matching Anything or the Lack of Anything
I’ve noticed that some newcomers to OCaml are a bit confused by code like the following:
Learning OCaml: Verifying tail-recursion with @tailcall
How can you be sure that an OCaml function you wrote is actually tail-recursive? You can certainly compile the code and look at the generated assembly code, ...
Learning OCaml: Quoted String Literals
While learning OCaml I’ve noticed one curious feature - it has two types of string literals. The first type are the common and quite familiar “double-quoted ...
Git
Git Tip: Find the Top Contributors
From time to time it’s useful to know who are main authors of some piece of a project. Admittedly most of the time I want to check who are the top contribut...
Display Git Configuration
From time to time I tend to forget what’s my effective Git configuration, so I have to check it somehow. Most of the time I’d simply do the following:1 ...
Basic Git Setup
Every time I change my computer or my operating system1, one of the first things I have to do is to configure Git. This article simply covers the basic Git s...
If I Could Turn Back (Git) Time
If only there was an easy way to find the first commit in a Git repository… A bit of Googling unveils some pretty hard to remember incantations like:
Deleting Remote Git Branches
This post is mostly a note to myself, since I constantly forget how to delete remote Git branches.
Emacs Configuration On GitHub
When you have applications, whose configuration is as complex as that of Emacs it’s always a good idea to store that configuration under version control so y...
Windows
How to Fix X11 Forwarding on WSL
I guess most of you are aware that I’ve been using Windows 11 + WSL as my main development environment in the past 4 years.1 I’ve spent some time running Ema...
Unix Sockets are Now Supported on Windows
I was surprised to learn that Windows has added support for Unix sockets (AF_UNIX) a few years ago (in 2017). From the announcement article:
New Laptop: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7
A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new laptop to replace my old MacBook 12-inch from 2017. As my followers might remember I was planning to buy either an ...
Emacs is not a Proper GTK Application Permalink
I got reminded yesterday that Emacs is not a proper GTK application after installing Windows 11 to make use of its built-in support for Linux GUI apps runnin...
The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II
Read this with an open mind.
vim
How to Vim: Proper Ways to Escape
ESC (Escape) is one of the most central key in the world of Vim. It takes you from Insert mode to Normal mode and it also serves to interrupt operations in p...
How to Vim: Reloading File Buffers
In Vim (and many other editors) we interact with the contents of files via the “file buffer” abstraction. Basically, that’s the in-memory representation of a...
How to Vim: Jump Around
One of the most important aspects of effective editing is to be able to quickly move where you want to go in a buffer - e.g. to a specific line, paragraph, c...
How to Vim: Toggle Comments
One if the things that had initially frustrated me about Vim is that out-of-the-box there’s no way to toggle comments on and off in programming languages. Th...
How to Vim: Format Lines & Paragraphs
When writing long code comments or prose (e.g. in Markdown) I like to have lines and paragraphs neatly formatted to fit the textwidth setting.1 There are two...
Rediscovering Vim
Most people who know me and follow my open-source work are likely going to be surprised that I’m writing an article about Vim. After all, I’ve been a devout ...
Z Shell
Switching from Zsh to Fish
Recently I’ve switched from Z Shell (aka Zsh) to Fish, after being a Zsh user since 2008. The experience has been pretty good overall and here I’ll share a f...
Rename Multiple Files in Linux
From time to time we need to rename a bunch of files according to some pattern. One simple example that comes to mind is that recently I noticed that some a...
One shell to rule them all…
Prelude
Automatically execute programs after zsh login
Sometimes you may want to start a couple of programs just after an interactive login to your favourite shell, which in my case would be zsh.
A nice zsh prompt
Recently I switched to zsh, after being a bash user for almost 5 years. I was in love with everything in zsh from day one, except one thing – the default pro...
Fedora
Running Xerox Phaser 3117 under Fedora 15
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for quite some time now and a Fedora user for just as long. The first distribution that I ever used was Fedora 2 and even though I...
Enabling 3D support for Nouveau in Fedora 13
Most of you probably have heard that Fedora 13 will feature experimental 3D support for the Nouveau open source driver for Nvidia cards. This support, howeve...
Using Xerox Phaser 3117 on Fedora
The driver selected by default by Fedora 11 is not appropriate for Xerox Phaser 3117 - it will not print with it. However there is a very easy solution to th...
Find out quickly which package provides a certain library with YUM
One of the most dreaded things that you can see while trying to run some application or trying to install an rpm package is a message saying that some requir...
RuboCop
RuboCop Logo
Meet RuboCop’s brand new official logo!
RuboCop 0.14: Beyond the Ruby Style Guide
Good news, everyone - RuboCop 0.14 was just released!
RuboCop 0.9 is now patrolling the streets!
RuboCop 0.9 is finally out! This was one of our most ambitious releases - over a month of work, ~250 commits, lots of new cops and features and a lot less bu...
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out, support for JRuby and Rubinius is in!
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out!
RuboCop 0.6.0 released
RuboCop 0.6.0 was just released! It’s RuboCop’s biggest and most ambitious release yet!1 Here are the highlights: Fun fact - the entire rele...
WSL
How to Fix X11 Forwarding on WSL
I guess most of you are aware that I’ve been using Windows 11 + WSL as my main development environment in the past 4 years.1 I’ve spent some time running Ema...
New Laptop: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7
A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new laptop to replace my old MacBook 12-inch from 2017. As my followers might remember I was planning to buy either an ...
Building Emacs from Source with pgtk
Yesterday the pure GTK (a.k.a. pgtk) feature branch was finally merged in Emacs’s master. In a recent article I mentioned I was super excited about it, becau...
Emacs is not a Proper GTK Application Permalink
I got reminded yesterday that Emacs is not a proper GTK application after installing Windows 11 to make use of its built-in support for Linux GUI apps runnin...
Zsh
Switching from Zsh to Fish
Recently I’ve switched from Z Shell (aka Zsh) to Fish, after being a Zsh user since 2008. The experience has been pretty good overall and here I’ll share a f...
Back to the Basics: Zsh without Oh My Zsh
.zshrc simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo Da Zshinci
Oh My Zsh: Fun with Take
Today I’ve noticed that Oh My Zsh provides one really useful command (implemented as a shell function) - take. I guess with a name like this it’s not immedia...
Reload Zsh Configuration
I’ve been using Zsh on-and-off for a very long time (15+ years), but I still occasionally learn something new about it.1 Yesterday I was setting up oh-my-zsh...
Career
Long Time, No See
It’s been quite a while since my last blog post. There hasn’t been much action on the open-source projects I happen to maintain either. The reason for this i...
Should I stay or should I go?
Prelude
My professional CV in LaTeX
After a long period of planning I finally migrated my professional CV from Word to LaTeX last weekend. Since I live in the European Union I used the europecv...
Rant
Die EmacsWiki, Die!
Prelude
The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II
Read this with an open mind.
Octopress
Migrating from Octopress to Jekyll
After dreading the migration of this site from Octopress 2 to Jekyll for years, I finally found the will to do it today. The process was actually very straig...
Octopress 3.0
Can’t wait for Octopress 3.0 to be released! Octopress 2 is killing me and I was seriously considering going back to a plain Jekyll blog, before I saw 3.0 is...
OS X
Emacs on OS X
Prelude
From Linux to OS X: 1 Year Later
Prelude
Ubuntu
How to Find Which Package a File Belongs to in Debian/Ubuntu
Occasionally I need to figure out which Debian package some file comes from (e.g. because I want to remove a redundant package or find related packages). The...
Working with Multiple Versions of Java on Ubuntu
Today I encountered a bug that was specific to JDK 16 on a project I was working on, and I needed to switch back my Java version to something older. I reali...
Ubuntu Tip: Removing All Packages Installed from a PPA
PPAs (Personal Package Archives) are a popular way to install pre-built packages that for some reason are not (yet) available in Ubuntu’s standard package re...
Year in Review
2023: The Year in Review
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Søren Kierkegaard
2022: The Year in Review
Another year is behind us and it’s time for the obligatory “year in review” blog post. I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, that’s why I’m getting to writing it a b...
2021: The Year in Review
Celebrate endings – for they precede new beginnings. – Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Fastmail
Fastmail: Year Two
Here’s a small follow-up to my usage of Fastmail that started in 2021. In a nutshell - little has changed since my previous update. Fastmail is still my favo...
Fastmail: Year One
A little bit over a year ago I switched from Gmail to Fastmail for my personal email. Looking back, I couldn’t be happier with my decision. The more I’ve use...
Farewell, G Suite legacy free edition
Today I saw the news that Google are pulling on the plug on the G Suite legacy free edition (a.k.a. Google Apps for custom domains). If you don’t recall the ...
Trick
Clojure Tricks: Number to Digits
If you’re into programming puzzles you probably know that there’s a whole class of problems about doing something (e.g. some calculations) with the digits of...
Clojure Tricks: Zipping Things Together
Many programming languages have a function for combining the elements of multiple collections (e.g. arrays or lists) together. Typically this function is nam...
Clojure Tricks: Replace in String
Today I saw a clever bit of Clojure code involving clojure.string/replace, that reminded me how powerful the Clojure standard library is. I guess pretty much...
macOS
My favorite tilde keybindings
I’m a big fan of the ~ (tilde) key and I make heavy use of it every day. That’s why I’ve never been fond of keyboards that move its position for whatever rea...
Replace Text in Multiple Files
Today I wanted to update a bit markup in my blog and it took me some time to get it right. Basically I wanted to replace the language in some fenced code blo...
macOS No Longer Ships with Emacs
While I was setting up my new mac mini yesterday I noticed something interesting - Apple have stopped shipping the ancient Emacs 22.1 with macOS! As I was mo...
Fish
How to Fish: Moving Between Recent Directories
I love Fish, because it makes a lot of common everyday tasks easier and more convenient. One such task is moving (switching) between folders you’ve visited r...
Switching from Zsh to Fish
Recently I’ve switched from Z Shell (aka Zsh) to Fish, after being a Zsh user since 2008. The experience has been pretty good overall and here I’ll share a f...
Updating my toolbox: Ghostty and Fish
Often when I’m setting up new computers I take a bit of time to evaluate my programming toolbox and make some (usually small) adjustments to it. In January I...
Swing
How to enable font anti-aliasing in a Java Swing app
If you have access to the source, you can do this in the main method:
How to center a JDialog over a JFrame in Swing
I always thought that the fact that JDialogs accepted a parent frame as a constructor argument was the thing, that would make the dialog’s position relative ...
Atom
Atom Feeds in Jekyll: Redux
It’s been over a decade since I’ve started using Jekyll and I’m still struggling with setting up Atom feeds there. Perhaps this happens mostly, because I rar...
Add an Atom feed to a Jekyll blog
As you know I’ve recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. One of the things I had to do was add an Atom feed (RSS sucks). It was quite the easy ta...
Scala
Incremental development with Scala and JRebel
One of the things I love most about Lisp development is the ability to develop applications in an incremental interactive manner - you write one function, co...
Gadgets
Back to Android: My Take on the Pixel 6A
A couple of weeks ago I made a spectacular and quite unexpected return to Android, after a long period of being exclusively in Apple’s mobile devices ecosyst...
Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
Prelude
Programming
What’s the Term for a Filename Without Its Extension?
Today someone asked in OCaml’s Discord “How do you call a variable that refers to a filename without its extension?”. I always thought there was no specific ...
Python
Ruby or Python?
Disclaimer
Debian
How to Find Which Package a File Belongs to in Debian/Ubuntu
Occasionally I need to figure out which Debian package some file comes from (e.g. because I want to remove a redundant package or find related packages). The...
Rake
Find out where a rake task is defined
Have you ever wondered where a particular rake task is defined? Enter rake -W (introduced in rake 0.9):
Ruby Tip #2: Get a List of All Rake Tasks
Many people are having trouble remembering all the rake tasks defined in a particular project’s Rakefile (especially if they hadn’t authored it). This is qui...
Android
Back to Android: My Take on the Pixel 6A
A couple of weeks ago I made a spectacular and quite unexpected return to Android, after a long period of being exclusively in Apple’s mobile devices ecosyst...
Android vs iOS: No Clear Winner
Prelude
CIDER
CIDER 0.9
CIDER 0.9 (a.k.a. “EuroCIDER”) is finally out and it’s our best release yet! (shocker, right?) It took a lot more time than I originally anticipated, but at ...
A CIDER Unsession at Clojure/conj
I’ll be talking about the evolution of CIDER at the conj, but I won’t be able to show much (in terms of features) during my talk. Luckily, however, beside th...
Hyvor Talk
Blog Comments are Back
This is going to be one super short post.
Farewell Disqus
Just wanted to let you know that for various reasons I’ve migrated the comments of (think) from Disqus to Hyvor Talk. I’ve described the process in a dedicat...
Blogging
A Decade with Jekyll
2021 is the year of anniversaries for me:
Blog Comments are Dead
Here’s one random observation - (almost) nobody comments directly on blog posts these days. It seems that all the conversations happen somewhere else - Reddi...
Tutorial
Resetting CircleCI Checkout SSH Keys
Lately I’ve been having some weird problems with CircleCI and some of my OSS projects (most recently CIDER) - the SSH checkout keys that CircleCI uses to fet...
How to Find Which Package a File Belongs to in Debian/Ubuntu
Occasionally I need to figure out which Debian package some file comes from (e.g. because I want to remove a redundant package or find related packages). The...
GitHub
Remove Stale Labels Instantly with GitHub Actions
I maintain a lot of OSS projects and often I struggle to keep up with all the tickets and pull requests they receive. That’s why I’m fond of the stale GHA wo...
Resetting CircleCI Checkout SSH Keys
Lately I’ve been having some weird problems with CircleCI and some of my OSS projects (most recently CIDER) - the SSH checkout keys that CircleCI uses to fet...
Mastodon
Revisiting Mastodon
After my recent article on Bluesky something rather unexpected happened. I noticed a link to an interesting post on Mastodon and when I signed in to check it...
Bozhidar is on Mastodon
Twitter these days is all about drama related to… Twitter (Elon Musk). That really pains me, given that as long as it has existed Twitter has been the only s...
GitHub Actions
Remove Stale Labels Instantly with GitHub Actions
I maintain a lot of OSS projects and often I struggle to keep up with all the tickets and pull requests they receive. That’s why I’m fond of the stale GHA wo...
Automate the Creation of GitHub Releases
I maintain many open-source projects and one of the most common tasks for me is to “create a GitHub release”, which is more or less the process of attaching ...
F#
The origin of the pipeline operator (|>)
These days a lot of programming languages (especially those leaning towards functional programming) offer a pipeline operator (|>), that allows you to fee...
Why F#?
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career...
Keyboards
Das Keyboard
Every professional developer knows how important to the development process the keyboard is, so it is only natural to be on the look for some quality piece o...
Design Patterns
The best way to implement the Singleton pattern in Java and Ruby
I haven’t posted anything lately, but I just received my brand new Das Keyboard and now I simply can’t stop typing. Recently I’ve been going through some eff...
IntelliJ
Emulate the behaviour of Return+Shift(insert new line) from popular IDEs(IDEA, Eclipse) in Emacs
I’m very fond of the ability to insert a new line below the line I’m currently at, and to position the cursor at the beginning of that new line, offered by m...
Eclipse
Java type indicators in Eclipse
One of the things that I don’t like about the default Eclipse settings for Java development is that in the package explorer all Java files appear in the same...
JBoss
Mofidy JVM parameters for JBoss AS
Most people have been in a situation requiring them to change one or more of the parameters passed to the JVM on top of which JBoss AS is running. For instan...
NetBeans
Changing the look & feel in NetBeans 6.8
Recently I’ve been trying to switch my work environment theme to something with lower contrast (namely the excellent Zenburn theme). Swing applications, howe...
LaTeX
My professional CV in LaTeX
After a long period of planning I finally migrated my professional CV from Word to LaTeX last weekend. Since I live in the European Union I used the europecv...
Kindle
Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
Prelude
Common Lisp
Parsing numbers from string in Common Lisp
One task that often recurs in programming is the need to parse a string representation a number(or several numbers) and convert it to its numeric value. Pars...
Groovy
Java.next() - The Groovy Programming Language
Java.next()
Books
Recommended Ruby books
Prelude
Django
Back to Top ↑Heroku
Back to Top ↑ActiveAdmin
Back to Top ↑RailsAdmin
Back to Top ↑iOS
Android vs iOS: No Clear Winner
Prelude
Projectile
Projectile 0.12 released
Projectile 0.12 is finally out!
Podcasts
Going Rogue
For many years I’ve enjoyed listening to programming podcasts - it’s the perfect way to make a commute a bit more fun and educational.1 RubyRogues was always...
HEY
HEY
That’s going to be one really short post. I just wanted to share with you that I’ve been using HEY (a new e-mail service from Basecamp) for the past few mon...
Disqus
Farewell Disqus
Just wanted to let you know that for various reasons I’ve migrated the comments of (think) from Disqus to Hyvor Talk. I’ve described the process in a dedicat...
Apple
The MacBook: Redux
I wonder how many people remember the 12-inch MacBook that Apple introduced to much fanfare in 2015. It was supposed to be the future of computing, a super t...
MacBook
The MacBook: Redux
I wonder how many people remember the 12-inch MacBook that Apple introduced to much fanfare in 2015. It was supposed to be the future of computing, a super t...
Recruitment
A Note About Recruiters
Yesterday I got yet another completely absurd cold email from an incompetent technical recruiter:
Firefox
Firefox is the Only Alternative
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a g...
Browsers
Firefox is the Only Alternative
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a g...
Advent of Code
Advent of Code 2021
I love programming puzzles, even if I’ve never been particularly good at solving them. For me they were always a good way to gain some practice with a new pr...
Communication
Link Log
Experimenting with Link Posts Permalink
17 years ago the famous blogger John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, introduced the concept of a “link log”/”linkblog”:1 I’ve always thought...
Magit
Magit for VS Code
Today I’ve learned about edamagit, a super faithful port of Magit for VS Code. It looks pretty similar to Magit and even has the same keybindings as Magit (e...
VS Code
Magit for VS Code
Today I’ve learned about edamagit, a super faithful port of Magit for VS Code. It looks pretty similar to Magit and even has the same keybindings as Magit (e...
GitHub Pages
Changes to GitHub Pages
Today I’ve noticed that updates to my site resulted in GitHub Pages deployment errors, even though everything was working fine locally with jekyll --serve an...
Perl
Perl Turns 34 Permalink
On Dec 18th, 2021, Perl turned 34!1 Here’s how it all started: Depending on what you consider the birthday, that is. The first Perl commit wa...
Laptops
New Laptop: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7
A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new laptop to replace my old MacBook 12-inch from 2017. As my followers might remember I was planning to buy either an ...
Lisp
Interactive Programming in a Nutshell Permalink
Today I came across this great summary of the concept of interactive programming:
Interactive Programming
Interactive Programming in a Nutshell Permalink
Today I came across this great summary of the concept of interactive programming:
Language Design
Bad Ruby: Hash Value Omission
Ruby 3.1 was recently released and it features one major syntax addition - you can now omit values in hash literals and keyword arguments in certain cases.1 ...
Code Style
Bad Ruby: Hash Value Omission
Ruby 3.1 was recently released and it features one major syntax addition - you can now omit values in hash literals and keyword arguments in certain cases.1 ...
Farewell, G Suite legacy free edition
Today I saw the news that Google are pulling on the plug on the G Suite legacy free edition (a.k.a. Google Apps for custom domains). If you don’t recall the ...
Wordle
Cheating at Wordle Like a Hacker
These day almost everyone on Twitter seems to be playing the word game Wordle, including me. You’ve probably seen many people around you sharing images like ...
Music
Titanium Edition
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music and the role it played in my life over the years. I think I’ve been pretty passionate about music ever since I di...
Crypto
The Case Against Crypto Permalink
Bitcoin reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about fox hunting. He said it was the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable. – Charlie Munger
Editors
Zed Editor
Yesterday the demise of Atom was a very hot topic for many programmers.1 One thing I noticed in the comments here and there was that the original team behind...
Haskell
OCaml at First Glance
You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
CircleCI
Resetting CircleCI Checkout SSH Keys
Lately I’ve been having some weird problems with CircleCI and some of my OSS projects (most recently CIDER) - the SSH checkout keys that CircleCI uses to fet...
Bundler
Updating the Bundler Version Specified in Gemfile.lock
You might have noticed one change introduced with Bundler 2.3 - it now requires you to run the version of Bundler that’s specified in your Gemfile.lock.1 Thi...
Bluesky
Bluesky
Remember me trying out Mastodon a while ago? Well, it didn’t stick. For various reasons.
Fediverse
Revisiting Mastodon
After my recent article on Bluesky something rather unexpected happened. I noticed a link to an interesting post on Mastodon and when I signed in to check it...
AsciiDoc
AsciiDoc Language Specification
I’m an avid fan of AsciiDoc and I’ve been using it for years to write documentation for some of my OSS projects (e.g. CIDER and Projectile). I try to keep tr...
Movies
Daniel Craig is my James Bond
Note: This article was originally published on “HEY World” on Oct 25, 2021. I’m moving it to my main blog, as I’ve decided to close my HEY account.
X11
How to Fix X11 Forwarding on WSL
I guess most of you are aware that I’ve been using Windows 11 + WSL as my main development environment in the past 4 years.1 I’ve spent some time running Ema...
CLI
Replace Text in Multiple Files
Today I wanted to update a bit markup in my blog and it took me some time to get it right. Basically I wanted to replace the language in some fenced code blo...
Helix
A Basic Helix Setup for JavaScript
Lately I’ve been a bit bored with my tried and true development tools and I’ve been playing with some alternatives. One of the most interesting tools I came ...
JavaScript
A Basic Helix Setup for JavaScript
Lately I’ve been a bit bored with my tried and true development tools and I’ve been playing with some alternatives. One of the most interesting tools I came ...
Project Maintenance
Automate the Creation of GitHub Releases
I maintain many open-source projects and one of the most common tasks for me is to “create a GitHub release”, which is more or less the process of attaching ...
Tools
Updating my toolbox: Ghostty and Fish
Often when I’m setting up new computers I take a bit of time to evaluate my programming toolbox and make some (usually small) adjustments to it. In January I...
Ghostty
Updating my toolbox: Ghostty and Fish
Often when I’m setting up new computers I take a bit of time to evaluate my programming toolbox and make some (usually small) adjustments to it. In January I...
ML
Why F#?
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career...
.NET
Why F#?
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career...
Regular Expressions
Learning OCaml: Regular Expressions
One of the things that bothered me initially in OCaml was the poor support for working in regular expressions in the standard library. Technically speaking, ...
Keybindings
My favorite tilde keybindings
I’m a big fan of the ~ (tilde) key and I make heavy use of it every day. That’s why I’ve never been fond of keyboards that move its position for whatever rea...
use-package
Using use-package the right way
I recently wrote that Emacs startup time doesn’t matter and I got quite a lot of heat for it. I totally stand by everything I said there, but I acknowledge t...
Elixir
The origin of the pipeline operator (|>)
These days a lot of programming languages (especially those leaning towards functional programming) offer a pipeline operator (|>), that allows you to fee...
zoxide
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
tips-and-tricks
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
shell
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
terminal
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
productivity
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
linux
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
macos
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
command-line
zoxide: tips and tricks
zoxide is a smart and fast alternative to cd that learns your directory usage patterns and allows you to jump to directories quickly. It’s one of my favorite...
Social Media
Bluesky
1 minute read
Remember me trying out Mastodon a while ago? Well, it didn’t stick. For various reasons.