DEV Community: Mátyás Budavári

Supercharge your command line

Mátyás Budavári — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 19:42:07 +0000

The commmand line can be your best friend during development, if you take some time to get to know its capabilities.
But even if you know what it can help you with, you can still extend it.
I'd like to introduce you some of my favourite tools, fzf, and oh-my-zsh.
By the end of this post I hope you'll see how well they can work together with you.

oh-my-zsh

I've always enjoyed tweaking my command line configurations, but usually when I needed a functionality,
I had to sit down and understand my code again to figure out where to put the new logic.

Last year I've found oh-my-zsh, and I felt relieved.
It makes it easy to create an easily managable config, nice themes and it is easily pluginable.
It has a nice community that creates and shares their work.

My favourite feature in it, other than its simplicity, is that zsh makes tab completion navigatable,
so you can use the arrow keys to select the appropriate value that you were searching for.

An other great built-in command is fc, that opens up my editor and lets me edit the previous command and run it after save.

Zsh comes embedded with plugins for commonly used commands like
git, docker and kubernetes.
It empowers them with aliases, command prompt information, also extends their tab completion by
helping with available field names and lets you browse resources.

New plugins can be installed usually with 2 lines of code, one of which is a git clone,
the other is editing the plugins list in .zshrc. Their configuration usually means to set some environmental variables.

fzf

fzf is a general purpose command line fuzzy finder.

Install guide.

It makes it easy to filter data by typing any part of the line.

You can pipe data into it, or filter file content from your disk.

I like the recommended settings, that way it stands out, from the other lines.



export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='--height 40% --layout=reverse --border'

Autocomplete

Many shells come with command history navigation helper shortcut ctrl+R,
but in the past it usually confused me more than what it helped.

I often just ended up using history | less and search through lines with /.

Plugins for the rescue!

zsh-autosuggestions

This plugin lets me see autosuggestions for my commands.

Install guide.

It makes me feel super productive, when I often need to use the same set of commands in a project in order to run, build or test it.

When I start to type the commands, I can accept the suggestion with a simple right arrow click.

If I need to search for a complex command there is a better way for that!

fzf in zsh

Fzf can be integrated with oh-my-zsh.

No further installation needed, only need to add fzf to the plugin array in .zshrc.

It is super convenient to fuzzy search for previous commands with ctrl+R.
It can find my previously typed command from just a few keystrokes.

It is also useful to insert file name from the current subtree with ctrl+T.

Enhance zsh tab completion with fzf

As I mentioned above, zsh comes with navigatable tab completion, but unfortunately the fzf plugin do not attach in every case.
Not so long ago I've found a great plugin, fzf-tab that lets you use fzf in every situation.

Install guide.

You have the option to toggle it temporarily with toggle-fzf-tab,
because sometimes it might not be what you need, maybe there are too many options, or too slow in special cases.

My zsh config

For reference my zsh config is available here.
The interesting part is the plugins section.
With only a few lines of code, the plugins come alive.



# fzf configurations
export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS='--height 40% --layout=reverse --border'
# Uncomment the following line to disable fuzzy completion
# export DISABLE_FZF_AUTO_COMPLETION="true"
# Uncomment the following line to disable key bindings (CTRL-T, CTRL-R, ALT-C)
# export DISABLE_FZF_KEY_BINDINGS="true"

plugins=(
  fzf-tab # to turn it on and off: toggle-fzf-tab
  zsh-autosuggestions
  fzf
)

In case it may be changed this is how it looks like at the time of writing.

I've tried zsh-syntax-highlighting, but is did not really like long commands, or pasted code, so I turnded it off.

Happy coding!

This post was originally posted on my blog.

Clipboard Goodies For Productivity

Mátyás Budavári — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 20:58:18 +0000

Have you ever typed ctrl-c instead of ctrl-v and had to recopy again?
Have you ever needed to copy and paste multiple entries at once from a page causing you to switch back and forth?
Have you ever needed to copy the output of a program running in the terminal?
I did, and got fed up with them almost 5 years ago, I'll show you how you can eliminate these problems.

Clipboard History

Most of my clipboard-related frustration came from the fact, that default clipboards in the operating systems store only one entry at a time. If I were to access the clipboard history, most of my problems were gone.
Luckily there are apps for that.

OS Defaults

The latest version of Windows 10 have a setting to make clipboard history available in the System settings under Clipboard history. It makes clipboard history available with win+V key. Not too configurable, but perfectly usable.

On Mac you can use a secondary clipboard with ctrl+k (copy) and ctrl+y (paste), alongside cmd+c (copy) and cmd+v (paste). You can still only have 2 separate entries at once.

Ditto

I started to use Ditto to eliminate this problem.
I loved that I could access my previous clips throughout the day.
It had configurable shortcuts to access the last 10 entries separately.
The only problem I had with it, that it only worked for windows.

CopyQ

When I started to use Ubuntu for my daily work I found CopyQ, a free open-source multiplatform clipboard manager. I use it daily ever since.

I love that it has a configurable clipboard size, I can search through the entries, and it has a configurable shortcut to Show main window under mouse cursor that can speed up work.

In case I copy sensitive data, I can turn off clipboard monitoring all at once with a configurable shortcut:
Toggle Clipboard Storing.

My only problem with it is that it sometimes tends to quit unexpectedly on mac. According to their github issues they're working on it.

Clipboard in the command line

In the command line you can take advantage of the operating system's pipeline. Imagine copy as a utility that consumes text, and paste as one that produce text, and when you use them the clipboard changes accordingly.

Let's see what are the exact utilities that can be used for different systems.

Mac

Mac has built-in utility commands to pbcopy and pbpaste to the clipboard.

# copy text to clipboard by piping to `pbcopy`
echo "Text to copy" | pbcopy

# paste text from clipboard by piping from `pbpaste`
pbpaste | less

Linux

On Linux that use X window manager you can use xclip.
In case you switch between Mac and Linux often, you can use aliases to keep things consistent.

# Install it with the available package manager.
# Add to e.g: ~/.bash_profile to load on startup
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'

On linux servers that does not have window manager I did not yet see the point to investigate this further.

Windows

Windows has builtin clip.exe.
Unfortunately, it can only copy TO the clipboard, can not read from it.

If you need access to the clipboard you need to use Get-Clipboard powershell module.

REM copy to clipboard with clip.exe
echo "Text to copy" | clip

REM get data from clipboard
powershell -command "Get-Clipboard"
REM get data from clipboard into file
powershell -command "Get-Clipboard" > file.txt

Cygwin

If for some reason you still use Cygwin,
you're in luck!
It makes Windows clipboard available as /dev/clipboard.

# copy text to clipboard by redirecting to `/dev/clipboard`
echo "Text to copy" > /dev/clipboard
# paste text from clipboard by reading from `/dev/clipboard`
cat /dev/clipboard

Web Browsers

In web browsers you can use the modern Clipboard API to interact with the clipboard. Previously you could use
document.execCommand() but it's obsolete, that means it might still work, but it's discouraged.

For browser support see clipboard at caniuse.com.

For up to date and extensive examples see these pages sbove.

Chrome DevTools

In Chrome developer Console you can use copy(object) builtin function to put an object to the clipboard.

It can be handy during debugging. Combined with $0 you can copy whole dom elements quickly.

copy($0)
copy($0.value)
copy(window.myGlobalObject)

Happy coding!

Cover image credit
Originally posted on my personal blog