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What do you Google EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. and never just memorize?

Ben Halpern on October 19, 2017

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Converting Array<->List in Java*. Been coding Java for 6+ years and still don't care to learn/memorize this.
Objective-C block syntax
bash test format and flags
vim macro create and execute

I noticed I could never remember these, so I always make aliases, shell functions, or short ~/bin/ scripts for them instead:

tar: xkcd.com/1168/
netstat flags (other than "-tulpn" which I have memorized as "tull-pin" like "Tolkien")
ssh tunnel syntax

Edit: *in one-line.
Array to list:

String[] array = ...;
List<String> immutableList = Arrays.asList(array);
List<String> mutableList = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(array));

List to array:

List<String> list = ...;
String[] array = list.toArray(new String[list.size()]);

Clear as mud...

Oscar • Jul 11 '18

Helpful protip. I learned yesterday, that list.toArray(new String[0]) is faster than the version with the explicit size given.

Lynne Tye • Oct 19 '17

I was about to write the same thing. How to vertically align elements... without using flex 😂

Sarah Chima • Oct 19 '17

Regex. While I understand how it works and how it can be used, it's difficult for me to memorize the right regex that should be used at every point. So I just google whenever I want to make use of it. :)

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah that's a big one

Tiago Marques • Oct 20 '17

I was just like that... but then I've found regex101.com/ and now, I'm almost proficiente writing regex!

gustavo • Nov 2 '17

regex101 is the single best resource I've ever found for regex.

Miff • Nov 2 '17

It's funny in my case. I know enough regex to get by, but I generally need to google to find out how to actually apply it.

Do I need RegExp.prototype.test or String.prototype.match in JS? What are the order of parameters in preg_match in PHP? What are the little parentheses things called in .NET, captures or groups?

Andrew • Nov 2 '17

I had the same problem, until I found Rubular:

rubular.com/

Bonus tip: making a permalink will also save all the test cases used. Makes for an excellent inline comment!

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

For me it's "manually start postgresql"

Every once in a while my postgres server isn't running and I know to punch that into my browser and land on this Stack Overflow question, where I proceed to copy this command into my terminal:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

It happens infrequently enough that I never bother to alias it or remember how to type it out. I just remember what to Google.

Galdin Raphael • Oct 19 '17

I have postgres installed via homebrew. So I use brew info postgres to copy the start command :)

lepinekong • May 25 '18

So did I then I realize how many precious minutes of my life I'm losing so I decided to buy a domain for 75 cents mycodesnippets.space :) I write things down little by little as soon as I need it the first time or I risk to never do it by lazyness !

Srikanth • Feb 11 '18

I was gonna say this. Have bookmarked the stackoverflow post on this. :D

Kaustav Banerjee • Oct 19 '17

cant you just sudo service postgresql start ? :P

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18

On Linux, yes. On OSX, no unfortunately.

Amin Arria • Oct 19 '17

How to make a tar file...

damian • Oct 19 '17

at least extracting is easy (say it in a german accent) tar -xzf "xtract ze files"

Chrissy Wainwright • Oct 20 '17

and -czf == 'compress ze files'

Amin Mohamed Ajani • Oct 23 '17

well what works for me is tar -xzvf "xtract ze vucking files"
No kidding that's how remember it

Amin Arria • Oct 20 '17

That's a great way! Jajajaaj

But it's important to note that tar is smart enough to detect the format so I prefer the general tar -vxf

dean • Oct 20 '17

Thank you so much.

Dave Jacoby • Oct 19 '17

sed and awk and how to use them.

Tony • Oct 20 '17

Creating SSH Keys

Martin Kiesel • Jun 4 '18

I just ssh-k ↑ in zsh and just list all previous key generation commands or if I am not sure what I am looking for I use fzf

# fh - repeat history
fh() {
  print -z $( ([ -n "$ZSH_NAME" ] && fc -l 1 || history) | fzf +s --tac | sed 's/ *[0-9]* *//')
}

Chad Kunde • Apr 28 '18

I was helping someone with this earlier this year. Ended up creating a helper for it:

gist.github.com/Kunde21/3633e1e9ef...

Mathieu PATUREL • Oct 19 '17

Suprised tldr didn't got mentioned.

It's a pretty neat tool to do this kind of things...

ImTheDeveloper • Oct 20 '17

Best link I've seen all week. Heroic!!!!!

@ScottFred • Apr 26 '18

That's awesome! thanks

Aidan Harding • Oct 20 '17

Javascript array methods. Is this one in-place, or returning a new array? I don't know, but MDN does!

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Oct 20 '17

And centering things. Completely clueless every time.

Andrew • Nov 2 '17

here's a handy multiple choice questionnaire!

howtocenterincss.com/

Michael Minshew • Apr 9 '18

holy crap, whoever made this site needs a medal. Great recommendation!!!

z0al • Oct 19 '17

How to extract tar.gz file in Linux command line!

dean • Oct 20 '17 • Edited

Saw a comment from above and it changed my life.

tar -xzf filename xzf = "Xtract Ze Files!" (german accent)

ErwanDavid • Oct 21 '17

Excellent, noté that you may get ride of the dash.

Galdin Raphael • Oct 19 '17 • Edited

tar -xf filename

Read as tar eXtract File filename.
Saw this on an SO answer and never had to google it ever again :)

z0al • Oct 20 '17

Wow, I never thought of it.

Thanks :)

Igal Tabachnik • Oct 20 '17

How to delete a remote branch in git.

ItsASine (Kayla) • Oct 21 '17

Cherry picking commits in git, because I can never remember if it's cherrypick or cherry-pick

A more efficient way would be to just do it and correct if it errors, or alias it to git cherry or something

Also, how to exit vim, and how to insert in vim, and basically how on Earth did I end up in vim omg get me out

Eljay-Adobe • Jun 11 '18

I've been using Vim now for about 24 years. Primarily because I don't know how to quit.

Bart Karalus • Oct 20 '17

I would be responsible for 95% of hits coming from google search into the Tutorialpoint's html5 minimal template. Now I could easily type it in every time I set up a new page, but it is now a matter of extreme laziness I think.

Paula • Oct 19 '17

This is stupid but g++ compiling filename and output order in the terminal. I've been doing it for four years now and still failing to remember.

Kevin Le • Oct 19 '17

regex

Stefan Hecker • Oct 20 '17

The same with me!! But I found VerbalExpressions (github.com/VerbalExpressions) to have solved it for me.

Kevin Le • Oct 23 '17

That is very good to know about.

Ferocit • Nov 2 '17

I usually just go to regexr.com and trial-and-error the syntax until it matches what I want.

Ryan Haber • Oct 20 '17

Regex kills me sometimes.

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Oct 19 '17

How to find out which process is listening on a certain point on my mac. I'm often switching between projects, and have a server from another project running on a port that I now need for another server.

And it looks like Heroku's CLI doesn't always stop all processes correctly when you stop it using ctrl+c

Palle • Oct 21 '17 • Edited

You could add a function to your .bashrc to make this easier:

listening() {
    lsof -n -iTCP:$1 | grep LISTEN
}

Then (after restarting your terminal or typing source ~/.bashrc) type listening 8080 to find out what process is blocking that port.

Loïc Giraudel • Oct 20 '17

ln -s [source] [destination] or ln -s [destination] [source] ?
find . -name [...] -exec grep '...' {} \;

And of course sed, awk and more generally shell syntax (if, loops, switch, etc).

Šimon Let • Jun 17 '18

I got a good way to remember argument order for ln:
Destination is optional so it must go second.
By default ln creates a link with the name of the source in the current directory.

Elliot Derhay • Jun 16 '18

Oh yeah, linking. Forgot about that one (obviously, since I need to Google it every time lol).

Andy Zhao (he/him) • Oct 19 '17

How to properly write a Rails migration file.

Add a column? Huh? What???

Ben Halpern • Oct 19 '17

Oh yeah. I always copy and paste from old files.

Ukaza Perdana • Dec 30 '17 • Edited

IIRC:

rails g migration AddStuffToTableName new_column1:integer new_column2:text #etc. etc.

Sourav Ghosh • Oct 20 '17

How to exit vim.

Michael Whitis • Oct 20 '17

Many moons ago, at one of my first jobs, I got myself in trouble with this. I was editing something in prod without knowing how to save or exit. I was a windows nt guy mostly. So, like one does, I hard-rebooted the server instead of asking for help... After the dust cleared, my boss made me sit at a keyboard for over an hour launching vim and learning how to at least save and exit. :) I have :wq, :q,:q! burned into my muscle memory to this day...

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18

Oh god why did they have the new guy making changes in prod you poor soul

ImTheDeveloper • Oct 19 '17

Everything git related

Harry Wood • Apr 24 '18

Yeah. For some reason I really find some git procedures harder to memorise than others. It's ludicrous the number of times I've googled "git unadd a file" and "git reset branch to remote"

George Offley • Oct 20 '17

How to spell maintenance.

Albrecht Scheidig • Oct 25 '17

That's unneccessarrelly, but true.

Angelika Cathor • Oct 20 '17

This! Plus a few other words: convenient, conscience, accommodate. I'm not a native speaker ;).

Jim Schubert • Feb 10 '18

I don't have to Google the spelling, but I'd say 99% of the time I type "valud". I say it correctly as "val-id" and only mistype because of the QWERTY keyboard layout. This is the only word that I consistently type incorrectly. It's not a speed thing (like "teh"), because it happens when typing slowly as well. I've been typing for a really long time and I'm beginning to think my brain just thinks this is a funny prank.

Robin Goupil • Oct 22 '17

As a non native english speaker:

slice()

splice()

Rob Cameron • Oct 19 '17 • Edited

Find a file in Linux. I know it involves "find" and "name" but I have to look up the exact syntax each time. (For reference, the sledgehammer version is find . -name testfile.txt from the root of the drive.)

Brett Stevenson • Oct 19 '17

Usually, anything that is outside of my basic Git workflow.

Gilberto Alexandre dos Santos • Oct 20 '17

PHP array_push and array_key_exists parameters order.

Erebos Manannán • Oct 20 '17

this alone should tell you you need to use another language ;)

Daan Wilmer • Nov 5 '17

Argument orders in all array functions in PHP for me. That's just horrible. VSCode gives hints though, so that helps. I still have to look up the exact names of functions regularly, though.

Anton Linevych • Mar 22 '18 • Edited

How to type this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ben Halpern • Mar 22 '18

Ha! Me too. I know to go straight to textfac.es

Den McHenry • Jun 16 '18

The best thing they ever added to Slack was the /shrug command.

Jess Lee • Nov 16 '17

RAILS MIGRATION

Aswath KNM • Oct 20 '17

unzip a tar file especially with that different extensions .xz , .bz etc..

vim commands to cut,copy and paste

regex in python and other python builtins . Can't memorize the whole docs right ?

Aaron Santos • Dec 22 '17

vim...

Alejandro • Oct 21 '17

text-overflow: ellipsis

Kasey Speakman • Oct 19 '17

Updating the list of git remote branches. It doesn't refresh when you sync so it will continue to list remote branches that don't even exist anymore until you manually run the command below. (Which I had to google again to put in this comment.)

git remote update origin --prune

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18

Git, brew, and bundler all have some kind of prune flag so it's starting to stick for me.

Oleksandr • Feb 13 '18

easy to remember because it is like dried fruit!

Christopher McClellan • Oct 20 '17

Setting firewall rules with iptables.

Syntactic Sugar • Feb 10 '18

Ever heard of ufw?

Javier Guerra • Oct 23 '17 • Edited

How to flush DNS cache on OSX

Matt Durr • Feb 10 '18

I literally added an alias to my ZSH config for this one

alias flushdns='sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder'

Sung M. Kim • Apr 8 '18 • Edited

I always Google how to create a webpack configuration file.
- You need to be a 🚀👨‍🔬 to configure it from memory.
Adding a style tag for CSS files 😝.

David Vincent Gagne • Oct 21 '17

MySQL and PHP date formatting. Every time. What’s weekday again?

Marco Alka • Oct 20 '17

flexbox and grid with all their different attributes and values :/

Jonathan Solis • Oct 20 '17 • Edited

How to git checkout a remote branch. I’m gonna try it it without googling

git remote add repoFork <url>
git fetch repoFork
git checkout —track repoFork/branch

I hope that’s right I just looked it up again yesterday

Hudson Burgess • Oct 20 '17

"How to do x in CSS" where x is anything

juankOrtiz • Apr 12 '18

My first choice was "Regex", but it seems you guys beat me to that choice.

So, without a shame I can say that everytime I search "how to insert an element at the end of another with jquery". Frigging append(), man.

shelby spees (she/her) • Aug 11 '18 • Edited

What gets me is when I'm switching between languages. Java uses add, Python has append, and Ruby uses push. But then some gem will use add.

This is why I shamelessly use IDEs while everyone I work with uses vim.

Ryan LaBouve • Oct 21 '17

When I accidentally commit on master instead of a branch and I need to reset my master to match origin:

git reset --hard origin/master

Florian Rohrer • Oct 20 '17

How to use grep and find.
Also when I write data = {} in Python, is this a set or a dict?

z0al • Oct 23 '17

This can't be a Set

data = {}

It's always a dictionary!
If you want an empty Set use:

data = set()

P.S. it's handy to use the official Python REPL and type type(youvariable) ;)

Sam Jarman 👨🏼‍💻 • Oct 21 '17

Its vs It's

Yechiel Kalmenson • Oct 19 '17

CSS attributes
Rails generators
ActiveRecord queries
Syntax for any function I don't use on a weekly basis

Brian Hanna • Oct 21 '17

The arguments for JavaScript's array.slice method. Every. Damn. Time.

Jeremy Mikkola • Oct 20 '17

The argument order to the various PHP array functions

John Best • Oct 19 '17

SQL syntax #ashamed.

Antonio Radovcic • Oct 20 '17

The order of arguments for map/reduce/filter is JS. Was it (index, item) or (acc, index, item) or (item, index)....

Jeroen Jacobs • Oct 20 '17

How to use "find ... -exec ..." correctly.

Dylan • Jun 15 '18

Everything! 🤪
But seriously, I think I do a lot of Googling (and looking at Documentation - same thing?) for things which are new or I'm uncertain of or if I'm working with an SDK like Firebase.
Is that the way I'm supposed to do it? 😂 I'd rather get things right first time rather than get it wrong and THEN Google. Sounds like the other things people Google are a lot more advanced. 😳

Sakib Hadžiavdić • Oct 19 '17

How to "unignore" files with git... Here is a nice and short way.

Max Antonucci • Oct 20 '17

Vim commands.

Just...I can't even.

Andrew • Nov 2 '17

ever play:

vim-adventures.com/

bonus tip: a lot of unix commands support vim keys by default. i.e. less and man

Vincent Grovestine • Oct 23 '17

In-place string substitution; usually performed on multi-gigabyte database dumps:

sed -i 's/STRING_TO_REPLACE/REPLACEMENT_STRING/g' reallybigdb.sql

Elliot Derhay • Jun 16 '18

Array.prototype.map() callback param order.

GA • Oct 20 '17

Yesterday was the first time I deleted a tag or branch (it was a tag) from a remote git repo without googling it first. Pretty proud of that.

Said Arab • Oct 20 '17

Selinux allow httpd

RobK • Dec 23 '17

"github ssh-keygen example" :D

Jorge Quijano • Jun 16 '18

Exit vim

Jonathan Clem • Nov 2 '17

The order of arguments to the reduce callback or block in any language.

Pablo Urcola • Jun 14 '18

how to undo $whatever in git

Nick Campbell • Jun 14 '18

alias_method in Rails. Confusingly, the arguments are the opposite order to Kernel#alias. And the examples for both are terrible!

Cadell • Oct 20 '17

ruby hashes lol

Aaron Schlesinger • Jul 18 '19

How to use ln. ln $LINK_NAME $TARGET or ln $TARGET $LINK_NAME? I can never remember

M.H. • Jun 14 '18

Converting UNIX timestamp to Excel date-time format with the correct timezone.

Chad Windham • Jun 12 '18

Most things sadly...

Kunal Dargan • Feb 11 '18

How to install opencv using pip !

Phillip Smith • Jun 12 '18

Iterating over keys in an object (#javascript)

pranay rauthu • Jul 26 '18

Slice vs splice in JavaScript

Jake Casto • Oct 21 '17

Converting StdClass <-> Array in PHP -> I always forget 'True' as the second arg of json_decode()
Git Commands
Format for PHP date()
Casting to a class in Python3