DEV Community: Hayden Rouille

My 2024 PDE: NeoVim

Hayden Rouille — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 02:43:27 +0000

Introduction

It's around that time of year where everyone's taking a look around and wishing they had better tools, fixing those small things that have been bugging them for months, and trying to set themselves up best for the year ahead.

Theres one lingering TODO I'd been putting off for far too long: "DOTFILES OVERHAUL".

Your personalised development environment™ deserves some love every now and then, and what better time than the start of a new year to give it a visit with a fresh perspective, open up 20 tabs with different Colorschemes and finally upgrade your plugin manager.

It always takes a bit of convincing myself, at the end of the day - this is my configuration, there are many like it - but this ones mine. Eventually, however, I'll take a big breath and begin the process.

On that note, sponsored by my several friends who wouldn't stop bragging about their configs, I figured I'd share what made this move worthwhile.

Context

For those of you unfamiliar with the Vim world, Neovim is a Vim fork which in recent years has become the de facto for new Vim developers. NeoVim has all the bells and whistles you want from Vim, but with a bunch of extras, too. If you want a community more passionate about contributing to the ecosystem and a lot more options when it comes to customising your PDE, it's a no brainer.

One of the largest draws to NeoVim for most is that you don't have to interface with VimScript any more.
Lua is fully supported in NeoVim, meaning you can forget all those plugins you've gotten (or not gotten) working in VimScript and embrace a language which is already widely used, even outside of the NeoVim sphere. This is great for a myriad of reasons, but for me so far, it's mostly because if you need an answer, it's likely easy to find.

Why?

My old dotfiles (specifically the Vim configuration) have done me well, but something I've been putting off for a while now is addressing the myriad of feature requests (requested by yours truly) I've amassed on various different TODO platforms.

When I last put together my five favourite plugins (some of which I'm still using) and rewrote my .vimrc, I was already aware I should've moved properly to NeoVim with a Lua configuration, but I decided that was a problem for future me. And that was over 18 months ago now!

Yes, I'd made small tweaks here and there. I wasn't going to put up with things just not working - but there are newer and better plugins in the NeoVim ecosystem I wanted to try out.

Not only that, but I was also noticing a lack of enthusiasm for the ones I currently had. The community contributions were becoming less frequent, and when I was searching for solutions to any problems, Google would present me with a slap in the face by linking me to threads asking why the plugin I'm referencing isn't even being used anymore.

When that's happening, you know it's time.

My Favourite Additions

Here are a few things that personally attracted me the most to take this on:

Treesitter is a syntax parser that'll build a tree-like structure to enable anything from excellent syntax highlighting through to complex refactoring. There are so many creative ways you can use Treesitter, from jumping around text objects to commenting sections of code, it's a must-have in my books.

nvim-treesitter / nvim-treesitter

Nvim Treesitter configurations and abstraction layer

Telescope.nvim brings a revolution to file searching, project navigation, and more. Its intuitive fuzzy finding capabilities, coupled with Lua scripting, make it an essential part of my modern Neovim setup.
Telescope's fuzzy finding has been a breeze for me. With very minimal set-up to integrate fzf as an extension or to use ripgrep for project wide searches I use it for buffer searches, file searching, project searching & more!

nvim-telescope / telescope.nvim

Find, Filter, Preview, Pick. All lua, all the time.

lsp-zero helps with configuring NeoVim's native LSP. It uses [mason] to manage the installation of different language servers and it was so easy to set up. Previously I was using coc.nvim, and whilst it served me great for a while, NeoVim's native LSP not only feels faster but is being actively maintained and seems to have a much brighter future. Removing coc.nvim's JS dependency was only a bonus :)

VonHeikemen / lsp-zero.nvim

A starting point to setup some lsp related features in neovim.

Mold your workflow to use Harpoon - I guarantee you won't go back. Harpoon is the best way to manage working in a large project. You can save the files and locations where you're actively working, adding and removing at a keystroke. For me, the biggest win here was stopping my terrible tab habit, where I'd have multiple tabs for different files, swapping between them with gt and gT. I can't imagine doing that any more.

ThePrimeagen / harpoon

Lastly, alpha.nvim. I mean, who doesn't love a cool looking dashboard when you first open up your editor?

goolord / alpha-nvim

a lua powered greeter like vim-startify / dashboard-nvim

Yabai & Skhd: Elevating Window Management

Moving beyond NeoVim, the inclusion of Yabai and Skhd has given me the closest to an i3 feel for MacOS. With a combination of some system settings allowing for window movement using <CMD>+1 through 8, Yabai stretching out my windows where I need them and SKHD allowing me to move them all with a couple keys, everything just feels naturally in place.

Going Forward

Now I've raved about NeoVim for a while, has it got you excited? Are you going to move to NeoVim from Vim or even better stop using Sublime?

Probably not, but hey, I can still sit in my ivory castle and enjoy the forbidden fruits of what is a better PDE for me.

I hope if nothing else, this has got you thinking about what your personal development environment could look like, or how it could change.

Feel free to check out my dotfiles, or even give them a go!

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

So, what does your PDE look like?

P.S. is it too obvious that the header image is generated using DALL-E?

What personal projects have you been working on recently?

Hayden Rouille — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 16:02:27 +0000

For a while now, having focused more on work and personal life, spending time learning new languages was put on the back-burner for me. It's easy to change your priorities and push back pursuing the curiosity you may have in learning new languages or technologies.

I've recently had a change in location and it's given me the opportunity I needed to hone in and focus on learning a few technologies that I've wanted to for a while now.

This time has reminded me that exploring new technologies is an integral part of my growth as a software developer. Once again, after spending time delving deep in to a technology I don't use so frequently is when I notice my overall confidence as a developer rise.

Learning should be fun, and building small projects to address gaps in your workflow or anything you see a need for is all part of it.

My most recent project has been a small CLI built in rust to make my interactions with Todoist easier, what have you built recently?

haydenrou / todoist_helper

CLI to interact with Todoist

todoist_helper

A simple CLI for adding, updating and viewing TODOs in Todoist

Prerequisites

Set an env variable for your Todoist API token (go to settings and integrations)
- export TODOIST_TOKEN=1234567890

Usage

To build, run cargo build --release. The executable will live in ./target/release/todoist_helper - you can move this to somewhere your $PATH includes to run from anywhere

todoist_helper add todo
todoist_helper show todos
todoist_helper complete todo 12345

Options

When adding a TODO, you can give the content (-c) flag to provide content
- todoist_helper add todo -c "My new TODO"
When showing TODOs, you can add filters with the filters (-f) flag, and multiple separated by commas. See Todoist's filter documentation *
- todoist_helper show todos -f "today"
When showing TODOs, you can specify the columns you'd like to see as a result with the attribute(s) (-a) flag
- todoist_helper show todos -a "id,content"

Advanced Usage

If…

View on GitHub

Why contributing to open source matters

Hayden Rouille — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 03:38:31 +0000

Open source is a pivotal part of modern web development, yet so many companies who use open source every day don't even think twice about encouraging their team to go forward and contribute themselves. It's often simply overlooked, yet supporting open source provides so many benefits to both teams and individuals.

Who?

The team at Power has always seen the benefits of contributing towards open source. Our team frequently submit pull requests into open source repositories and it's strongly encouraged by our leadership team.

Our business technology department host a quarterly Nitro Create event (usually in person). Nitro, being the internal software we build from day to day, and the event being, for lack of a better term, a week long hackathon. Anyone who contributes to the creation of our product from developers, to scrum masters, to UX - are given the opportunity to work on some cool ideas and spend time working with teammates that they don't see as often.

Not only does this serve as a way to introduce all the new remote members to their teammates, but it gives our team something to look forward to on a regular basis that can be an outlet of creativity and social interaction. (which is much needed in today's climate!)

As you can imagine, COVID brought a lot of stress to a home remodeling business, but our business technology department fortunately kept operating throughout the pandemic (when I was hired) and worked hard to help the business pick up as fast as possible on the other side. Our Nitro Create event in June was canceled, and in September, with the world still in an unpredictable state, could not be held in person. So we did something (arguably) better.

What?

Instead of working together on our internal software, the team were given an opportunity to work on one of five open source projects which had the availability for us to support them and push out as much work as we could within a week. Needless to say, it was a great success. The team loved being given this opportunity. Over a third of the team that hadn't submitted an open source pull request before were enlightened to the idea and many have expressed they will continue contributing to open source as part of their ongoing development.

With 103 contributors across our team from developers, producteers, scrum masters, UX and site reliability engineers, we submitted 142 pull requests over the course of the week. The companies we supported were so appreciative. And for us, the reward was seeing the incredible difference we made in such a short period of time.

I'm sure I speak for us all when I say we're proud of the work we did, and genuinely felt welcomed by the teams as we integrated into their projects for the week.

Where?

Ruby for Good

One of the organizations we worked closely with for the week was Ruby for Good. Not only do they develop awesome products for communities that really need it, but it's all open source!

Throughout our week, we worked on several projects in development with members of the Ruby for Good team. Here are a few:

Abalone

rubyforgood / abalone

A data tracking and analytics app for abalone conservation efforts.

Abalone Analytics

The Abalone project is a data tracking and analytics system aimed at storing and measuring data for population trends, mortality rates, and breeding programs. Designed as a multi-tenant application, Abalone will initially serve two stakeholders, the Bodega Marine Laboratory at UC Davis and the Puget Sound Restoration Fund in Washington State.

The Bodega Marine Laboratory's White Abalone captive breeding program is working to prevent the extinction of the White Abalone (Haliotis sorenseni), an endangered marine snail. White abalone are one of seven species found in California and are culturally significant to the native people of the area. White abalone were perilously overfished throughout the 20th century, resulting in a 99 percent population decrease by the end of the 1970s. This group is working to reverse their decline and have already seen some great success, they currently have more abalone in the lab than exist in the wild!

The…

View on GitHub

Who wouldn't want to save Gary the Abalone!?

CASA

rubyforgood / casa

Volunteer management system for nonprofit CASA, which serves foster youth in counties across America.

CASA Project and Organization Overview

A CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) is a role where a volunteer advocates on behalf of a youth in their county's foster care system. CASA is also the namesake role of the national organization, CASA, which exists to cultivate and supervise volunteers carrying out this work – with county level chapters (operating relatively independently of each other) across the country.

Table of Contents

Welcome contributors!

We are very happy to have you! CASA and Ruby for Good are committed to welcoming new contributors of all skill levels.

Find issues to work on here on the issue board. Issues on the project's TODO column are another way…

View on GitHub

Diaperbase

rubyforgood / human-essentials

Human Essentials is an inventory management system for diaper, incontinence, and period-supply banks. It supports them in distributing to partners, tracking inventory, and reporting stats and analytics.

Human Essentials

Mission 💖

Human Essentials is an inventory management system built to address the needs of Diaper Banks as directly and explicitly as possible and adapted to meet the needs of other Essentials Banks. Essentials Banks maintain inventory, receive donations and other human essentials supplies (e.g. diapers, period supplies), and issue distributions to community partner organizations. Like any non-profit, they also need to perform reports on this data and have day-to-day operational information they need. This application aims to serve those needs and facilitate the general operations of the Diaper Banks (e.g., using barcode readers, scale weighing, inventory audits).

Impact 🌟

Human Essentials has over 200 registered banks across the United States at no cost to them. It is currently helping over 3 million children receive diapers and over 400k period supply recipients receive period supplies. Our team is in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) and…

View on GitHub

Mutual Aid

rubyforgood / mutual-aid

Mutual aid management platform for groups who build, support, and strengthen community resilience.

CircleCI	Demo site	Test site

✋🏾 On Hiatus...

Thanks for coming by! This project is in a period of diminution 〽️.

⚒️ We, the current maintainers, no longer have enough capacity to dedicate to it, and
♻️ Mutual aid efforts we'd been connected to have evolved. As of now, none of them are actively using the app.

We of course welcome any injection of energy in the form of new maintainers, contributors or interest in using the app. Please get in touch by commenting here.

What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid is when people get together to build community by volunarily sharing resources with each other. Mutual aid groups are more concerned with local resiliency than global campaigns, prefer solidarity over charity, and have existed around the world for over 200 years. Mutual aid groups recognize that structural inequality and injustice must be accounted for and addressed in…

View on GitHub

TechGirlz

TechGirlz is an awesome organization aiming to inspire young girls to pursue a career in tech. Their mission is for such an important cause and the impact they are having is truly outstanding.

Our team really got stuck in throughout the week and led workshops for several groups of girls from all around the world teaching them about different fun tech such as VR. By the end of the week, the girls were teaching them!

Having contributed to Abalone and CASA, I can personally say the team are a great bunch and very welcoming to newcomers. If you are looking to get involved in open source for the first time, any of these repositories would be more than happy to have you, so check them out!

Continuing into Hacktoberfest

For Hacktoberfest, I submitted several PRs to both the Abalone and CASA projects, and I know that I'll be looking to do more in the future. It was a great challenge and a brilliant community initiative which brought together a lot of people and their awesome ideas.

For myself, I've found that jumping into open source has given me the opportunity to see how others work, introduce myself to different libraries and learn from a new, innovative community. I attribute the majority of my development as a coder to open source, be it articles or pull requests. If you are on the fence as to whether it'll be beneficial, trust me - you won't regret it.

Closing thoughts

Open source is a community which so many businesses rely on but so few support. Power giving us the opportunity to make a difference
by contributing to charitable and not-for-profit projects, truly emobodies the values of open source.

I hope this article and the efforts of Hacktoberfest inspire others to take the leap into the open source world. There is so much more to gain than just notches on your Github profile. (though, who doesn't love them!)

Power is a great company that has an ever-growing technology department, here's our job page if you're interested.

[4/4] Beginners BASH basics - The student becomes the master

Hayden Rouille — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:04:03 +0000

Part 4 of a 4 part series

Part 1 is available here, 2 here and 3 here

Now that you've learnt how to wield the command line to your advantage, I wanted to share some utilities that help with day-to-day tasks and show you how you can customise BASH to act how you want it to.

The power of BASH truly surpasses the extent of these articles, but when you grasp what is capable, the sky is your limit and you can take yourself in a new direction and start teaching me!

scp

As you remember using SSH in part 3, I wanted to show you a quick tool that may solve a problem you ran into not long after using SSH. How do I move files to my server?
After developing an application, be it a static single page app or a fully fledged piece of software, you will reach the point where you need to move the files that you were likely developing on your local computer over to the server.
There are many tools to do this (such as capistrano for ruby), and I'm sure this is not the route you'd go down for each individual deployment, but nonetheless you will occasionally need to move secret keys or small files to your server.

Though we didn't cover it, cp is a command that will copy a file. cp my_file another_directory/ will copy my_file to another_directory. Simple.

scp though, takes it to another level. The secure copy can copy files over SSH using a secure copy protocol.

Example usage:
scp ~/projects/my_stuff/my_file.md user@server:/home/user/app/
If you have setup your SSH config file, you won't need to use the whole user@server as we learnt last time.

htop

top is a utility that shows real-time information about running processes. If you want to see how much memory a specific process is taking up, or how hard your computer is working - use top. (or htop)

htop is an enhanced version of top, there are a few of them with the word top in the name, but they are all much of a muchness. I find htop to have some nice colors and it's easy to read. Check it out: htop

ln

One important command I wanted to briefly touch on is ln. ln will create links between different files. For example, if you had a repository with your dotfiles in, you could link them to the location that your system expects them to be in.

Without the -s flag, ln will create a hardlink, and with the -s flag, a symbolic link. The difference is that a hardlink will link directly to the inode the target is stored at, and a symlink will link to a file or directory. You can read more here

Example usage:
ln -s ~/projects/dotfiles/bashrc.symlink ~/.bashrc

oh my zsh

Whilst I don't use zsh, I thought it's worth touching on as it seems to be an industry favourite. zsh is an interactive shell built on top of BASH which utilises all the great parts of BASH and has some extras on top. It has great coloring and command prompt customizability, and if you use the oh my zsh framework, has some brilliant plugins you can install very easily to populate the most common aliases for tools such as git.

Check out oh my zsh here

customization

BASH (and zsh if you're using it) both allow you to customise your setup. This is done through the ~/.bashrc file. (or ~/.zshrc)

The rc files are loaded at the start of each session, so if you make a change, you'll have to source the file to gain access to your changes in the current session. If you want to read more about how sourcing the bashrc and bash_profile works, read the below.

May 13 '14 Comments: 3 Answers: 3

275

I found the .bashrc file and I want to know the purpose/function of it. Also how and when is it used?

Open Full Question

To source your rc files, you can use the source keyword, or ..

source ~/.bashrc
. ~/.bashrc

Your bashrc can store all sorts of functions, variables or aliases that you want, here are just a few examples:

environment variables

An environment variable can be stored by adding export MYENVVARIABLE="my stuff" to your bashrc. This can be useful because certain tools will check for environment variables to see where to store cache or load files. You can view your environment variable by using echo $MYENVVARIABLE.

aliases

If you have a command you run frequently, you can alias it to something smaller to make it easier. Add an alias to your bashrc like so: alias gd="git diff", and then access it after sourcing your bashrc by just typing gd.

functions

If you have a set of logic that you want to put into a single command, you can create a function in your bashrc. I use feh which can change my backgrounds via the command line, and so I created an alias of a function I made called chbg, which changes my background to a random one from a folder. Check out an example here

A simple function could look like the following:

function say_hello () {
  echo "Hello, world!"
}

conclusion & extras

Now that you've learnt more than the basics of BASH, you can explore the world of scripting and play around with your own setup until your hearts content!

You can check out how I've used the above techniques to make my workflow easier in my configuration repository below. You can see most of the useful parts in the README but have a look through the files to see how it's done! And don't forget to give it a star!

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

haydenrou/dotfiles

<strong>My Personalized Development Environment</strong>

To prevent myself from going down wild Linux rabbit holes and trying every distribution I can get my hands on, I've transcended into an Apple chad. Therefore, this configuration may require changes to work in a Linux environment.

Mandatory Software:

Optional Software: (Warning: you may have to remove some alises / plugins if these are not installed)

bat
eza
zoxide
todoist_helper
neofetch
tmate
btop
alacritty terminal
zoxide
nerd fonts for devicons to display in nvim-tree
- for instance, brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts && brew install --cask font-commit-mono-nerd-font, and added to your terminal (see ./alacrity/config.yml)
cmake brew install cmake or else the installation of telescopes fzf plugin will fail
fd as an optional dependency of telescope, used in telescope.lua
gpgtools for signing commits. (Note: instead of symlinking git/.gitconfig, copy it instead as you'll need to add a…

View on GitHub

I've left out my 2 favourite command line tools from these articles, and made an article dedicated to them, check out how to optimize your workflow with fzf and rg below!

optimizing your workflow with fzf & ripgrep

Hayden Rouille ・ May 23 '20

#bash #vim #productivity #webdev

Let me know in the comments if you have learnt of some other cool tools or if you've written something thats improved your workflow - I'd love to hear about it!

And that's a wrap - I hope everyone has enjoyed the series :)

[3/4] Beginners BASH basics - Wait, BASH can do that?

Hayden Rouille — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:07:36 +0000

Part 3 of a 4 part series

Part 1 is available here, and 2 here

In part 3 of the beginners BASH basics series, we're going to dive into some seemingly daunting tools. By the end, you're going to start to see that the power the command line provides is much greater than you ever realised..!

This article cannot even scrape the surface of the likes of vim, tmux or sed, so if you're getting to love them as much as I do, then I'm going to recommend some further reading which I'll leave at the bottom of part 4.

Remember, there are people who have used these tools for 30+ years and are still learning things...

On that note - let's get started.

sort

sort does exactly what it says on the tin. It will sort lines of text files. sort is often used to help display a commands output in a more human readable fashion. Some useful flags include -n to sort numerically instead of alphabetically, -r to sort in descending order, or --ignore-case to... ignore case.

Example usage: sort my_file.md

piping

Lets put together a few of our learnt techniques into one command!
Much like the common pipeline operator in other languages such as Elixir, "piping" is a very common way to pass the STDOUT of one command to other commands and manipulate the end result in the way you want.

So how do we do it? Well, the | key, AKA "the pipe" can be used after any command that will give STDOUT.

Example usage: ls | grep .md will get you all files in the current directory with .md in the name by sending the result list of ls into the last argument of grep.

You can also pipe each individual argument into another command using xargs such as ls | xargs cat which will use cat on each result.

If you wanted to use the argument in a specific usecase, you can use -I{} after xargs, which will give you access to the argument through {} in a following command.

sed

sed is used to manipulate text is a scriptable manner. It's commonly used for find and replace, or deleting values from a file or list of files.

Example usage: sed -i 's/my_search/my_new_value/' my_file.md

Find out how to create some awesome bindings for super-fast project wide search and replace in my article about optimizing your workflow with fzf & ripgrep!

awk

awk is a great dynamic tool for working with files. It offers an API capable of printing or manipulating text in ways you can only imagine!

One of the most common ways I use awk is to print out specific values from a column of data.

Say you want to see the filesize of every file in your directory. You'd probably start by executing ls -lah. You can then pipe into column, which maybe not for ls, but for a lot of commands helps get the STDOUT into a format usable by awk.
Then you can pipe the result into awk '{print $5,$9}' to see the values of the fifth and ninth column, the size and name respectively.
If you want to get real fancy, you can use awks OFS to set a tab delimiter and then sort them by filesize.

Check this out:
ls -lah | column | awk 'OFS="\t" {print $5,$9}' | sort -h
Awesome, right?

ssh

ssh is a secure shell protocol used to securely login to remote servers. If you have your own website, or are looking at creating one - you should at least know the basics of ssh.

Providing you know the name and IP of the server you want to connect to, you can connect simply by using ssh username@ip.

ssh supports a lot of useful flags, some to note are -J if you need to jump from one server to another, -p for a specific port or -D for tunnelling.

Unless you've setup an ssh key and added it to the .ssh/authorized_keys file at your remote server, you'll be required to enter a password when accessing your server. Learn more about setting up ssh keys with Digital Ocean's handy article here

Taking it a step further, you can even specify different hostnames, ports and access keys if you are accessing several servers and don't want to type the IP or full command every time by using your ssh config file.
The config file will be at $HOME/.ssh/config, and will look something like the below:

Host thenameiwant
    HostName 127.0.0.1
    Port 3000
    User myuser
    IdentityFile /home/userName/.ssh/id_rsa

Now, when you use ssh thenameiwant, it will be the same as writing ssh myuser@127.0.0.1 -p 3000, except it will use the specified ssh-key (in case you need multiple).

I've started writing a utility to help manage my ssh configuration file, you can check it out here. It's still in early development, but it's a fun tool!

tmux

tmux is a terminal multiplexer. This means that within your terminal application, be it the basic terminal, Alacritty or iTerm, you can spin up multiple terminal sessions and easily move between them.
This comes in super useful when you want to run a long download in one, and continue working in another. Or running a server in one and using your command line editor in another.

tmux usually comes standard with any Linux server you may have, and so when you're accessing another server, if you wanted to leave a command hanging on a port for instance, you could spin up tmux, run the command, detach and exit. This will continue running after you exit ssh.

To enter a tmux session, you can simply type tmux to the command line, or create a named session with tmux new-session -s my_name. This allows you to kill the session by name (tmux kill-session -t my_name) or attach to a specific session (tmux attach-session -t my_name).

All tmux specific commands are used after the set tmux prefix. The default for this is ctrl-b.
For instance, if you want to detach your session, you can use ctrl-b+d.

You can then view your sessions with tmux ls and attach or kill as per the above.

vim

Vim is an extremely powerful text editor accessed via the command line. Whether you want to use it as your IDE or not, it's worth knowing the basics because there will undoubtedly be a day when you have to edit a file on a server and you'll be stuck using nano. And nobody likes nano.

Vim has a concept of different modes. To start with, we'll just cover the two you need to edit a simple file - normal and insert mode.
To move around in vim, use the arrow keys, or hjkl. w will move you forward a word, and you can move down by paragraphs by pressing { and }, or half a page at a time with ctrl-d and ctrl-u.

Vim uses a concept of motions when in normal mode. You can use dd to delete a line, or dw to "delete word". The same applies with c.

When you're in insert mode after using c, pressing i or a (append), you can type as normal.

Remember, you can always get back to normal mode by pressing esc.

And the notorious question, how do you leave vim? :wq will save and exit the current file, or :q! will quit without saving.

conclusion

Feel like a command line pro now?

As I've mentioned before, these command line tools have improved my productivity tenfold... it's just a bonus that you can show them off to your friends in your fancy scripts!

If you want to check out how I customise tmux or my bashrc, head over to my repository below. If you have any questions, feel free to pop me a message or leave a comment below!

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

[2/4] Beginners BASH basics - learning the way of the shell

Hayden Rouille — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:06:16 +0000

Part 2 of a 4 part series

Part 1 is available here and part 3 here

In part 1 we discussed commands that will give you your first feel into the world of the command line. We learnt how to read the docs, look at and read your files, remove them and even search in them, but now it's time to learn some tools that will really increase your productivity in the terminal.

Part 2 aims to give you the knowledge you'll need to start using the command line over your editor in certain scenarios. You'll learn how to start reading what's actually happening in some basic scripts and more importantly, you'll be able to start being super fast and productive inside the often daunting black and white world that is the terminal.

Let's dive straight in.

touch

touch will create a file, in the same way that mkdir will create a directory. You will learn later on how you can save a file directly through the vim editor, however there may be an occasion where you want to create one or multiple files but not edit them at the time.

Example usage: touch projects/TODO.md

echo

echo is a versatile command that allows you to print arguments or variables. echo "Hello, world!" to print out some plain text to the terminal, or echo $HOME to view an environment variables value. (P.S, we'll get more into that on part 4)

Example usage: echo can be used just print a value, to append a line to the bottom of a file with echo $HOME >> my_file.md or even to override a files content from the top with echo $HOME > my_file.md.

curl

curl is used to transfer data from or to a server. You can for instance try curl https://dev.to which will give you the response for here!

Example usage:
You may see the following common usage for curl, which will place the output to the file specified (setup.sh): curl -fLo ~/setup.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haydenrou/dotfiles/master/setup.sh

ping

ping will send packets to a host, expecting the host to receive them. It's often used to check that a host is up and running.

Example usage: ping dev.to

Tip: Recently I came across an issue on one of my servers where I couldn't connect to github. My first point of call was to ping github.com, to see if the issue was there. I knew my server had internet access, but for some reason my ping was dropping off and not working. This was preventing me deploying my application and in general was just a pain.

To fix it, I simply added 140.82.112.3 github.com www.github.com to my /etc/hosts file by using echo "140.82.112.3 github.com www.github.com" >> /etc/hosts which makes sure when trying to access github, my server knew where to go to. Problem solved.

chmod

chmod can be used to change file modes.

One of the most common usage is to change a file to be executable, for example if you've created a script and want to run it.

Example usage: chmod +x my_script.sh

And then you can run the script like so sh my_script.sh or ./my_script.sh

You can use chmod to change permissions to be read only, read and write, or just about whatever you want - you can see all the uses in the man page!

less

When you open up a man page or use some other utilities, you may notice that the way the file is shown is within a menu that at first may be unfamiliar.
You may gather quickly that you can go up and down using the arrow keys or hjkl if you use vim, and that you can exit using q, but I always wondered for a while... what exactly was this?

In most cases, this opens an instance of less. less will open a file from the top, and allow you to scroll through it as mentioned above, or search for what you're looking for. less is great if you want to quickly skim a file or see the contents in an easier to navigate way.

Example usage: less my_file.md

Tips: ctrl-d and ctrl-u will go down and up respectively. /my_search will search when you press enter and bring what you're looking for to the top. And of course you can go up and down slower using hjkl or the arrow keys.

tail

As you've probably guessed, tail will show you the tail end of a file.

Why is this useful? Well you can view the constant updates to a file by using tails -f flag, and see it updating on the spot.

If you have a file (like a Rails application's log for example) that you want to follow, you can run tail -f log/development.log (or production.log in the relevant environment) to see the stream of output.

Example usage: tail -f log/development.log to show a constant stream, which you can end by pressing ctrl-c. tail -n 5 log/development.log to view the last 5 lines.

conclusion

That's part 2 of our beginners BASH basics, I hope you enjoyed it! Next we're going to dive deep into some more complex tools and programs such as vim, sed and awk, so stay tuned!

As always, feel free to ask any questions or if you're interested in how I've customised my environment, head over to my repository below.

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

Check out part part 3 here!

[1/4] Beginners BASH basics - becoming one with the shell

Hayden Rouille — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:15:34 +0000

Part 1 of a 4 part series

View part 2 here and part 3 here

When I first started using the command line it seemed quite daunting to me. I didn't know what I should know and I didn't know what benefits investing time into learning more would give me. My job required me to learn more Ruby, so why learn bash?

I have since learnt that having knowledge of just some basic commands improves your workflow tenfold, and for me in particular increased my confidence when sshing to a server or even just having to navigate around my own environment.

By the end of this series I hope you'll feel at home when navigating the command line and won't feel a need to use the file manager GUI again!

Here are some of my most commonly used commands:

man

man provides you with the manual documentation for a utility. Use man the same way you would when using programming documentation - it will tell you all the available flags for a command and what it can be used for. The main source of truth when questioning how to use a tool!

Example usage: man ls (use q to exit)

Equally, you could also use info ls to view this information too.

ls

ls will list the files in your cwd (current working directory).

If you use man ls, you can see that ls offers many flags. The most common usage however, are (in my opinion) lah. Executing ls -lah will give you a list of all files in your CWD (current working directory) including hidden (.files), with their file-sizes, permissions and dates when they were updated.

Example usage: ls -lah

You can then use the file command on a file to view the details of it!

cat

cat will spit the contents of a file out to the command line.

Example usage: cat myfile

mkdir

mkdir creates a directory at the specified location. As with ls, mkdir has many useful flags that you can see in the manual. The most notable being -p, which will recursively create the directories as specified.

Example usage: mkdir -p ~/my_directory/my_subdirectory

rm

rm is used to remove a file or directory.
Warning: paired with sudo, or even on it's own, this can be a very dangerous command if used incorrectly.

You may want to use the following flags:
-r for recursive
-v for verbose (it will give feedback to what is happening)
-f for force

Example usage: rm -rvf ~/asd

grep

grep will allow you to search for specific content from a file or result list.

Example usage: grep 'my_search' test.md, you will see all the lines containing my_search within test.md.

You can view lines around them by using the -C 3, or get all lines not containing the match with -v.

sudo

sudo will execute the following command as a superuser. You'll often need to use sudo to run certain commands, for instance commands that will affect the system.

Example usage: sudo systemctl status mysql

conclusion

And that's it for part 1 of my beginners bash series! If all of the above is below you... stay tuned for some more advanced tips!

Dive into curl, chmod and more in Part 2 - here

Feel free to ask any questions or if you're interested in how I've customised my environment, head over to my repository below.

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

optimizing your workflow with fzf & ripgrep

Hayden Rouille — Sat, 23 May 2020 02:29:18 +0000

On the back of my post about my favourite vim plugins, one tool that sparked particularly more interest was file and keyword searching using fzf & ripgrep. For that, I decided I'd give my 2 pence on what features I use the most and how I have them integrated into my workflow.

Let's start with how you can use it outside of vim

the terminal

fzf

junegunn / fzf

🌸 A command-line fuzzy finder

Whether you use bash, zsh or fish, fzf works great with an easy installation process. Just follow along from their github page instructions.

As I'll keep saying, one of the main benefits of using fzf is the speed - it's just incredibly fast. But let's look at the use-cases and see exactly how it can speed up your workflow.

command line search

Whatever code editor you use, you most likely have a file searcher, usually bound to ctrl-t or ctrl-p. In vim, a lot of people use ctrlp.vim.
Fzf has this built into the command line, and it's super fast if I didn't already mention.

Simply press ctrl-t and your files will be loaded, you can use a fuzzy search and look for whatever you need. (fzf will by default ignore what your .gitignore file contains)
You may ask, what use is this if it just pastes the file to the command line? Well - take it to the next level and pipe (|) it into a command.

Working on several different features at once in a big application, and forget branch names?

git branch | fzf | xargs git checkout

I personally alias this in my bashrc as the following, which makes my branch swaps easy as pie: alias gcob='git branch | fzf | xargs git checkout'

command history

This is probably the best feature here. How many times have you typed part of a command and hit ctrl-r until you reached the right one, only to realise you got part of it wrong and have to history | grep my_command to figure out what you ran. Not no more.

Fzf has built in ctrl-r functionality which when you find your command and press return will paste it to your command line, allowing you to edit it before sending it off.

I can't begin to tell you how useful this is.

autocomplete

When searching for a file to edit or a directory to move to you can simply **<tab> to use fzf and complete your command.

Take it to the next level with ssh support - ssh **<tab>. Awesome right?

patterns

Fzf also has patterns. Want to find a file that specifically ends in .rb? Just add $ to the end of the search. Omit specific searches? !ignored_search_result

ripgrep

BurntSushi / ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

You've probably guessed by now that I love fast programs. Ripgrep is no exception to the rule. Another tool that outright shows their speed in their readme, it really lives up to it.

You can plug it in to fzf with the following, or use it for simple greps as per below.

export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="rg --files --hidden --follow --glob '!.git'"

On the command line you can use ripgrep as simple as rg 'my_search' and it will recursively find your results in a flash. And it comes with some great options; --hidden to show hidden files; -s for case sensitive searches; -l to just show the files that contain the result without showing the context; and -g to include or exclude files or filetypes, such as rg 'my_string' -g '*.rb'.

But the real fun comes in when you use it in vim.

vim

Both fzf and rg work extremely well with vim. To get started, you'll have to get a couple plugins for fzf.



Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'do': { -> fzf#install() } }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'

And ripgrep works great with a small command to plug it in.

set grepprg=rg\ --vimgrep\ --smart-case\ --hidden\ --follow

I personally don't use set autochdir (auto set current directory) so setting the below will use the current working directory (cwd) for ripgrep.

let g:rg_derive_root='true'

Here are another few configurations I use with fzf & rg in vim. This is personal preference so go ahead and use work makes the most sense to you.



nnoremap \ :Rg<CR>
nnoremap <C-T> :Files<cr>
nnoremap <Leader>b :Buffers<cr>
nnoremap <Leader>s :BLines<cr>

:Files is not working

Check out this github issue if you're having this error. I made the below simple fix in my vimrc and haven't had any problems since.



set rtp+=~/.fzf
set rtp+=/usr/local/opt/fzf

Now the magic happens.

searching

For those of you familiar with vim mappings, you've probably already guessed, but simply press ctrl-t to open up the menu, and get searching!

As you've probably noticed, this gives you a brilliant preview screen for the file you're planning on opening up. I find this brilliant with no performance change, however if you prefer no preview window, just use :FZF instead of :Files.

From inside the menu, fzf will automatically detect ctrl-t to open the file in a new tab, ctrl-v for a vertical split or ctrl-x for a horizontal split.

buffers

I bind <leader>b for my buffer menu, opening the standard fzf menu for all files in my buffer. This is super useful if you've had a long vim session going.

:BLines will simply search the current buffer for a specific string. You may be thinking you can do this with vims / or ? - but sometimes it's nice to see all occurrences in one window and look through, instead of spamming n or N. If you want to look at all the current buffers, you can use :Lines.

multiple files

One other cool feature from the fzf menu that I mainly use in vim is <tab>. As you can see below, I've selected several different files and now I can go through them one at a time to see or make the changes I needed.

rg

This plays well with rg. My \ binding will open a menu and scan all files recursively from your current working directory. Search for the string you want, and use fzf as you would normally.

Bonus - Search & Replace

Whilst we're at it, lets go over a couple ways to find and replace in vim using fzf/rg.

If you search using the above set mapping \ for a keyword you need, and press <tab> on the files you want to change, vim will then open up a Quickfix list. Inside of here, you can simply :cfdo %s/my_search/replacement/gc to go over all the changes. You can then :cdo update or :wqa to update them all - easy!

If you'd rather do this through the command line, rg and sed make this super easy.
rg -l 'my_search' | xargs sed -i 's/my_search/my_new_value/'
and you're done!

If you're using OSX - you may want to note an oddity with sed addressed here which you can fix by simply changing the command to
rg -l 'my_search' | xargs sed -i '' -e 's/my_search/my_new_value/'

Conclusion

Searching files and their contents is something that any text editor worth using must accommodate. Fzf & Ripgrep makes vim not only accommodate it, but thrive with them. Why settle for anything less?

As always, here are my dotfiles, configuration for vim and other config files. Feel free to check them out!

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

Cheers :)

the only 5 vim plugins i need

Hayden Rouille — Tue, 19 May 2020 01:56:19 +0000

I've been hooked on vim for the best part of 18 months now, and earlier this year I decided it was time to step away from my comfort of using the ultimate vim setup and make my own.

At the end of the day, most users won't touch half the features that come with a pre-configured setup that big, and it turned out I could strip what I actually used from it into my own vimrc fairly easy.

Whilst I have more than just the plugins below, these are the 5 I use the most frequently.

1. vim surround

tpope / vim-surround

surround.vim: Delete/change/add parentheses/quotes/XML-tags/much more with ease

Vim doesn't come with everything out of the box, part of the reason we love it. As simple as it is, vim surround makes editing code a breeze. How many times have you been in some js and realised you needed string interpolation? Vim surround makes this easy, simply press
`

cs"` `{% endraw 

{% raw %}

%}{% raw %}

You can even change HTML tags with
` cst<div> `

2. vim commentary

{% github https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary no-readme %}
Tpope is at it again - vim commentary is another simple plugin that just makes life easier.

Want to comment out the 5 lines below in the correct format for the file you're in? Easy -

` gc5j `

The only one I've had some issues with is typescript & react, and for that i've just written the below in my vimrc
`autocmd FileType javascript,javascriptreact,typescript,typescriptreact setlocal commentstring={/*\ %s\ */}`

3. emmet vim

{% github https://github.com/mattn/emmet-vim no-readme %}
Spending more time on front-end code recently has made me appreciate emmet even more. It's just one of those plugins you have to have in a code editor.
` div.test>li.item*2 `
Will simply resolve to
`<div class="test"> <li class="item"></li> <li class="item"></li> </div>`

4. coc.nvim

{% github https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim no-readme %}
That's right, I've left the best for last. Jump around files like it's no ones business with some simple key mappings, and have code suggestions/autocomplete in almost any language.

`:coc-install coc-tsserver` and you're set up for javascript, giving you the best autocomplete you've seen. Ruby LSP? Easy, just
`:coc-install solargraph`

There is even an LSP for TailwindCSS which I've been enjoying using recently, no more visiting the website every time you forget a classname!

One of the best things about vim is the movement - Not only does coc provide amazing autocomplete, but it just takes movement to the next level.

Add a few bindings to your vimrc and from JS imports, classes or methods in Ruby, whatever you want.

` nmap <buffer> <leader>gd <Plug>(coc-definition) nmap <buffer> <leader>gr <Plug>(coc-references) `
Go to the definition with your binding, and use vims built in jumping to get you right back where you were, no time wasted at all!

5. fzf

{% github https://github.com/junegunn/fzf no-readme %}
If you haven't used fzf yet, you're going to be blown away. I've been using FZFs file searching in a project that has been developed for over 10 years and FZF still proves its, as they put themselves, blazingly fast.

I add some simple keybinds for easy access
` nnoremap <C-T> :Files<cr> nnoremap <Leader>b :Buffers<cr> nnoremap <Leader>s :BLines<cr> `

And after that, it's smooth sailing. You even get a cool preview window!

FZF and RG makes search a project easier than it's ever been.

Conclusion

Sitting down and writing my own vimrc, taking my favourite parts from different repositories and customising them took time, but has proved to be priceless.

As with anyone who uses vim will tell you, there is always more to learn, and that's what I love about it.

If you want to check out my dotfiles, you can see them below.

haydenrou / dotfiles

My Personalised Development Environment

Thanks for reading :)

5 Gems I use in every project

Hayden Rouille — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 01:59:51 +0000

When you're building applications with such a large open source community such as Ruby on Rails, it's important to know what resources you have at hand. RubyGems have thousands of contributors worldwide and is one of the biggest open source language communities around, why wouldn't you take advantage of that?

Here are some gems that I find myself using in every project:

1. Rubocop

A Ruby code standard enforcer and formatter, Rubocop is an essential gem for development, helping you write better code. We all know reading code is harder than writing it, so when you're given a community agreed set of code standards, why not use them?

Remember, writing code can be subjective, and if you're working in a team it's important you all agree on a style guide as it's there to help you.

rubocop / rubocop

A Ruby static code analyzer and formatter, based on the community Ruby style guide.

2. Pry

Debugging can be a pain to say the least. When I was a junior dev, there were countless times where I'd be re-running code with a slightly different puts every time until I could figure out what's wrong. Pry changed all that.

My most used feature of pry is by far binding.pry. By placing a binding.pry within your code, when it's ran your server will stop there and allow you to play around in the console.

Don't stop there though, as it says in the README: Pry is not just an alternative to IRB. Pry gives you access to so much more than just its local variables and methods. For example, you can navigate to completely different classes by just typing cd MyClass or see all the different method calls on a class by ls MyClass. If you've just used Pry for generic IRB commands, you've barely scratched the surface.

pry / pry

A runtime developer console and IRB alternative with powerful introspection capabilities.

3. Webpacker

Webpacker is essentially a wrapper for javascript's webpack that allows rails to manage and bundle javascript code in the same way webpack would.

One of the best features of webpacker (in my opinion) is live reloading. Webpacker will generate a file, bin/webpack-dev-server which when ran will keep an eye on your packs and when saved live reload for you.

Note: webpacker comes as a default gem with any project using Rails 6 and above. If you don't want to use webpacker you can simply run rails new myapp --skip-webpack-install.

rails / webpacker

Use Webpack to manage app-like JavaScript modules in Rails

4. Whenever

Whenever is a way of adding cron-jobs to your rails application. It might be sending out daily emails or checking and updating configurations, but whatever it is, whenever is always a gem I end up using somewhere along the line.

With minimal setup, Whenever will write the jobs for you and you can view them by simply running crontab -l.

javan / whenever

Cron jobs in Ruby

5. Exception notification

No one likes to find out about bugs from the end-user. Whilst this can be unavoidable, exception notifications gives me a a head start fixing them.

When I use devise on projects that require authentication, the warden user key is stored in the session, allowing me to see who's produced the error. Users are impressed when you tell them you're fixing a bug they've encountered without them even raising it, talk about customer service!

smartinez87 / exception_notification

Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails

Some close runners up include Devise, Audited and Fast JsonApi, but they are usually more situational.

This is obviously personal preference, so what gems do find yourself using every project?