productivity

Managing dotfiles with rcm

These days it is a common practices to manage, version, and share configuration files for command line tools (bash, vim, etc) via a GitHub repository. There are plenty of open repositories to study and borrow things from, as well as the tools and scripts to help one with setting things up. Have a look at the awesome-dotfiles – a curated list of dotfiles resources.

Fedora Magazine runs an article about rcm – one of the many tools that are handy for managing dotfiles.

Personally, I haven’t heard of rcm until now. My own setup went through several iterations, varying from custom scripts, to Puppet, and now to Ansible. Have a look here. By the way, my dotfiles aren’t only about the command line tools. I also keep my desktop environment configuration in there (MATE + i3).

DevHub: TweetDeck for GitHub

If you are spending a lot of time on GitHub, following people, teams, and projects, then checkout DevHub – a TweetDeck-like application for GitHub that works on Android, iOS, and as a web application.

It conveniently brings together your repositories, notifications, and all the other goodies, helping you to significantly cut down the time and mouse clicks.

Internet Search Tips

This title almost sounds stupid, right? I mean, pretty much everyone who has ever been online knows how to Google. Even kids.

But I promise you it’s not. Searching for quick and simple stuff – yes, sure, is easy. But not many people I’ve met know how to use even Google’s advanced search options (despite there being a gadzillion articles online), let alone other search engines. Searching for something non-trivial, like research papers and books, is even trickier.

Hence the Internet Search Tips. Here’s the intro from the author:

Over time, I developed a certain google-fu and expertise in finding references, papers, and books online. Some of these tricks are not well-known, like checking the Internet Archive (IA) for books. I try to write down my search workflow, and give general advice about finding and hosting documents.

Awesome git addons

Awesome git addons is yet another one of those curated awesome lists. This time it’s for git version control tool. And once again, it’s mind blowing.

Git itself is a very flexible and powerful tool. But it truly amazing how far some people take it. In the list you can find anything from aliases for complex commands, to full-featured integrations with GitHub, git flow process, deployment tools, and much more.

Using aws-cli –query Option To Simplify Output

Eric Hammond shares a super-handy tip for those of us who work with Amazon AWS via the command line:

I just learned about a recent addition to aws-cli: The --query option lets you specify what parts of the response data structure you want output.

Instead of wading through pages of JSON output, you can select a few specific values and output them as JSON, table, or simple text. The new --query option is far easier to use than jq, grep+cut, or Perl, my other fallback tools for parsing the output.

Read the rest of his blog post for a few examples of how to use it.