DEV Community: Mithil Poojary

Mitype ⌨️ - Typing Speed Test Right In Your Terminal

Mithil Poojary — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 20:07:38 +0000

Who doesn't like to type fast? I made mitype with an intention to test typing speed and hence improve it at the ease of one command.

Feel free to contribute 💚

Mithil467 / mitype

Typing speed test in terminal

⌨ Mitype ⌨

Typing Speed Test in Terminal

Mitype is a program to test (and hence improve) your typing speed right from the ease of your terminal.

Written completely in python with no external dependencies!

✨ Main Features

🖥️ Cross-platform
🎦 See your replay
📝 Choose custom text input
🅰️ 6000 text samples
🌈 Colored texts

🔧 Install

Mitype can be easily installed by:

pip install mitype

📈 Usage

Once installed, you can run it simply as:

mitype

You can also customize each run by specifying the following options as:

-f FILENAME, --file FILENAME Uses contents of file as sample text.
-d N, --difficulty N N can be in range [1, 5] with 1 being the easiest. This decides the length of the text.
-i ID, --id ID ID can be in range [1, 6000].

You can quit mitype anytime by pressing the ESC key or CTRL-C.

You can…

View on GitHub

Features-

Supports several languages like English and German
Choose your own text files
Or randomly pick up a sample from 6000 entries
View results and replay after every test
Choose difficulty level
Has cross-platform support
Works with both python 2 and python 3
Uses in-built python modules only
Available on pypi allowing easy install
Colored highlights
Runs on web, although the latency is kinda high

How to get it?

pip install mitype

How to run it?

Choose random text:
mitype
To choose a sample file:
mitype -f <your_file>
Choose a difficulty level:
mitype -d <N>
Choose a text ID:
mitype -i <ID>

Built with

Python and all its inbuilt modules
Curses library - Easily capture keystrokes
Sqlite3 - Database for storing text
Text provided by typeracerdata.com

Mitype is open to feedback, contributions and new ideas 💡
🌟 Star the repo on GitHub!

Make your app appear on the start menu with just one file

Mithil Poojary — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 03:04:19 +0000

You just made an awesome app! Now you want others to be able to install it, and use it. You may want it to appear on the main menu, it must be searchable, it must appear in the context menu as "open with ". You might further want to pin it to the dock or add it to favorites.

Taking the example of Coreavor, a simple image viewer that I made recently, I needed to associate the program with images so that I can right click and open it in Coreavor.

All of this is achieved with the help of a desktop file which is a simple text file with .desktop extension.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Coreavor
Icon=/usr/share/icons/coreavor.png
Comment=A simple Image Viewer
Exec=/usr/local/bin/Coreavor %U
TryExec=/usr/local/bin/Coreavor
Terminal=false
MimeType=image/png;image/gif;image/jpg;

Every desktop file must have this structure, although not all fields are compulsory, but messing up a field might result in unwanted results.
Most of these fields are self explanatory.

Exec takes in the instruction to be executed. The %U at the end takes in command line arguments which are passed to your program.
TryExec is the file path to the executable.
MimeType is used to associate your program with files of a certain type.

You can read about the standard and information regarding more keys used in .desktop file here

Place this file in the /usr/share/applications directory so that it is accessible system wide, or in ~/.local/share/applications to only make it accessible to a particular user.

All your other apps' desktop files are present here. You can have a look at any of these files to understand and learn from them.

References:

Gnome's guide

KDE's guide

3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Publishing My First Python Package on PyPi

Mithil Poojary — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 16:48:46 +0000

I published my first python package Mitype.
PyPI and pip have made it so easy to install software!
This is all it takes.

pip install package_name

It is equally easy to share and distribute your awesome program through PyPI. Or is it?
I tried and failed multiple times. Publishing the package is the easy part. Getting it working the way you want it to be is not.

1. A version once published can't be reused❗

Say you published version 0.1 for your project. And then when you tested it out you realized that you missed to include that important database file! You have no option other than re-publishing a later version. Be careful whenever you publish that version on pypi. The same version cannot be edited or reused. You can delete it, but you cannot reuse it, even when deleted.

2. TestPyPI is your best friend

I so badly wish that I knew this earlier. You can first publish your package to test pypi, without affecting the actual index. You can also test the package version by installing it just like a regular python package.

3. Getting that sweet version update takes time

I would publish the version and get the success message. But then when I tried installing that version, I would get an error:

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement mitype

I'd get so upset thinking "What went wrong?!".
But then it would work! It just takes time, sometimes about 20 minutes. No need to worry!

I am just a beginner, and Mitype was my very first project on PyPI. It was one of my very proud moments!
All of you have your own different story! What is something that you wish you knew before publishing a python package?

How To Make A .deb For Your Program

Mithil Poojary — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 12:15:15 +0000

I developed mitpick, a tool to capture the terminal output screenshot, right from the terminal, and copy it to the clipboard. All you need to run is mitpick. I am just using mitpick as an example, and the reason that I explored deb packaging in the first place.

Let's get straight into how I packaged it into a .deb file.

You'll need a folder to store all contents of the package. Let's call this folder mitpick_1.0-1 (package-name). This folder is like the root of the target system.

Binary files or executables go into the bin folder.

mkdir mitpick_1.0-1/usr/local/bin -p
cp <executable_path> mitpick_1.0-1/usr/local/bin

The -p flag takes care that the directory is made with all parent directories as well. Otherwise, the command gives error no such file or directory exists.
Other resource files go into the share folder. Like in my case, I needed an external bash file as well.

mkdir mitpick_1.0-1/usr/local/share/mitpick -p
cp <resource_file> mitpick_1.0-1/usr/local/share/mitpick

Lastly, you need to make a text file called control which includes all metadata information about the package.

mkdir mitpick_1.0-1/DEBIAN
nano mitpick_1.0-1/DEBIAN/control

Package: mitpick
Version: 1.0-1
Architecture: amd64
Depends: xdotool, xclip
Maintainer: Mithil Poojary mithil467@gmail.com
Description: mitpick
 When you need to screenshot your terminal, just run this
 small program!

Each line in the description should start with a single space.
Read about metadata options here.
Lastly, you need to package it.

dpkg-deb --build mitpick_1.0-1

dpkg-deb: building package 'mitpick' in 'mitpick_1.0-1.deb'.

Now you can install it:

sudo apt install ./mitpick_1.0-1.deb

That is all for this guide 💖.

Motivation to make mitpick

I have assignments which involve taking screenshots (a lot of them) of the terminal output for certain commands. The screenshot tools work just fine, but it is really tedious to perform those 4-5 clicks. Mitpick captures the screenshot of the terminal and copies it to the clipboard. All I need to do is execute mitpick, and boom, the screenshot is taken and copied to the clipboard to be pasted onto your google doc. It is not that good with the boundaries of the terminal and is in no means a perfect tool.

| Cover pic - screenshot of cool-retro-term on my PC

10 Useful GCC Flags That I Use Regularly

Mithil Poojary — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 16:11:02 +0000

C++ was my first programming language. I have been learning and using it for a little less than 2 years now. I have been of the idealogy (which is silly) that if something can be done in c++, do it in c++. Yes, I am slowly moving towards other feasible solutions for certain use cases.
Here are my frequently used gcc flags.

1. -o

gcc example.c -o outfile

The default executable name is a.exe or a.out or something similar depending on the host machine. You can easily set the executable name to, for example, outfile in this case. Other file names are also affected, like object files, assembler files.

2. -Wall, -Wextra

Wall and Wextra turn on certain warning flags, that are almost certainly errors in my experience.

3. -O2

gcc optimizes code for compilation speeds by default. You can enable this flag and optimize the code for runtime. The compiler optimization step is crazy and can optimize the code to extents one cannot imagine! I have read somewhere the compiler optimized a for loop which was adding some element each iteration to a single multiplication statement!

4. -g

Produces debugging information. Helpful when debugging with gdb as variable names, function names are listed which otherwise are not.

5. -S

Your C source code is compiled down to assembly first. The assembly output is stored in a file with the help of the -S flag.

6. -E

Do preprocessing only, and output the entire source code. You include a lot of headers inside your code, all that does is copying the content of the header into the source. This outputs the preprocessed source code.

7. -Wfloat-equal

Directly comparing floats is a bad idea. If you execute:

float a=0.2f, b=0.2f;
if(a + b != 0.4)
printf("Not equal");

You will get the output Not equal. This is because of precision issues. This can be caught by the compiler by using -Wfloat-equal flag. I will soon write a post explaining this behavior, and how to tackle it. For now, just understand it is bad.

8. -std=XXX

Set a language standard. Very useful when you strictly want features from a particular standard. For example,

-std=c++14
-std=c++17
-std=c99

9. -I

gcc -Iexample_dir_name example.c

By default, gcc looks in the current working directory. You can also include multiple other directory locations with -I flag.

10. -D

gcc -Dmacro_name=definition

Define a macro with a value. This is helpful when you want to run the same code in multiple ways such that the code depends on that macro, or maybe for debugging.

For a (very long) list of other such flags, refer to the manpage of gcc (man gcc).
Mention your top gcc flags down in the comments section!

| Cover Pic by Taras Shypka on Unsplash

Firefox Shortcuts That I Use Daily

Mithil Poojary — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 02:26:09 +0000

Through all the years of using Firefox as my primary browser, I have gathered an intuition to do most of my operations through keyboard shortcuts. Some of these might apply to Chrome as well. I have roughly sorted this list based on the frequency of my usage.

1. CTRL + R

Reload.

2. CTRL + (click on link)

Opens the corresponding link in a new tab. I hate going back on a webpage. I always use this feature when I feel the need.

3. ALT + num_key (1,2,3...)

Switch Tabs.
Changes the active tab to the nth tab in the series. If you press a key that exceeds the count of the currently opened tab, it automatically sets the last tab as the active tab. I like to press some random num_key such as num_7 when I want to move to the last active tab.

4. CTRL + ENTER

While typing the URL of your favorite site, you can skip the .com part by pressing CTRL+ENTER while your cursor is inside the address field.

5. CTRL + SHIFT + DEL

Clean Up.
I usually clean up my firefox sessions when I am about to go off for a break. This is

5. Ctrl + Shift + P

Private Mode.
Really handy.

6. ESC

Stops Loading.
You wait for the vital parts of the site to load, but then decide to hit refresh as you see no hope and bam that is when it But you already hit refresh. Happened to you? Just hit ESC.

7. ALT + LEFT_ARROW

Go back.

8. CTRL + H

View History.

9. CTRL + O

Open File.
I like to open certain files in firefox itself, maybe a PDF or an image, firefox can handle them really well. This shortcut allows you to choose a file from the file picker.

10. CTRL + D

Bookmark current page.

11. CTRL + SHIFT + T

Undo closed tab.

BONUS COMBO!

Duplicate Tab
CTRL + L - Select current URL in address bar
CTRL + C - Copy it.
CTRL + T - Open new tab.
CTRL + V - Paste.
ENTER - Go!

Did I miss something cool?! What's your favorite keyboard shortcuts?

| Cover Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

How To Write Better Git Commits

Mithil Poojary — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:10:18 +0000

Git plays a very important role in software development. It allows for collaboration across the globe. In such an ecosystem, git commits must show what the other developer's thought process was while working. Maybe that other developer is your self from 3 months back.

The title must start with a capital letter unless it is an identifier.
The body and the title must be separated by 2 blank lines.
The title should not end with a period.
Each line in the body shouldn't exceed 75 characters.
Use the imperative form of verbs (Add not Added, Remove not Removed).
The title shouldn't exceed 72 characters.
The commit's body must explain the entire thought process behind the changes or further details.
Your git commit must have a title that briefly sums up the changes made to the codebase.

You could visit any successful open source project and view their git commits.
For example, this commit is a good example of a well-written commit.

I would like to quote what Atom says in their contributing guidelines.

These are mostly guidelines, not rules. Use your best judgment.

This is a summary of these resources:
Gnome guidelines
Atom guidelines
I highly encourage to read these. 😄

| Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash

6 Python Built-in Modules You Need To Know About

Mithil Poojary — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:15:03 +0000

1. Convert Python2 code to Python3 with 2to3

How many times did you turn down a python script just because it was written in Python2? 2to3 converts Python2 code to Python3.

2to3 -w example.py

Before | After

2. Create an HTTP server with http.server

Place your index.html file and start a local webserver.
In the same directory as the index file, run:

python3 -m http.server 8000

Now you can visit localhost:8000.

3. Pretty Print JSON using json.tool

I like to deal with most of my developer things inside the terminal, as it is generally faster to implement. Ever had to deal with JSON in your terminal? You must have if you used curl before.

curl -s https://dev.to/api/articles\?username=mithil467

The output is not pretty printed and it's impossible to make anything out of the result. Python's json.tool has got your back!

curl -s https://api.github.com/users/Mithil467 | python -m json.tool

I further piped the output to pygmentize -l javascript for better visual impact.

4. Better text wrapping with textwrap

Back then when I was developing Mitype, I had this exact problem. I had to do text wrapping based on the width of the terminal.
I ended up writing my algorithm, but now I have found this!

S = "I have started my journey into blogging! Can I call myself a writer now?"
S_wrapped = textwrap.fill(S, width=14)

I have started
my journey
into blogging!
Can I call
myself a
writer now?

5. Print tokens for your code with tokenize

Tokenizing is a stage in the compilation phase where source code elements are converted into tokens. Let's tokenize the same file that we used in our 2to3 example.

python3 -m tokenize app.py

You might want to have a look at some more builtin modules here https://docs.python.org/3/py-modindex.html

| Cover pic by Chris Ried on Unsplash

The bit-wise similarity between the character cases

Mithil Poojary — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 16:13:06 +0000

The ASCII value of 'a' in binary is 1100001.
The ASCII value of 'A' in binary is 1000001.

Notice the similarity?

The 6th LSB is set for lowercase chars and reset for uppercase chars. Rest all bits are the same.

This can be fun to play around with. For example, you can lower the case by simply doing

c | 32

And you can toggle the case (that is uppercase to lowercase and vice versa) by:

c ^ 32

Combining the above two actions, you can upper the case:

(c | 32) ^ 32

Another point to observe is that the difference between these ASCII values for any uppercase char and corresponding lowercase char is 32.

Oh, and by the way, man ASCII provides a nice table for ASCII values.

The investigation phase

While doing some crypto exercise, I had a string that was encrypted such that each character of the original string was XORed with some (unknown) character, to form the new character for the encrypted string.
The task was to decrypt and get the original string. Now it is a known fact that the actions of XOR can be reversed by XORing once again with the same number (a character is a number).

(a ^ b) ^ b = a ^ (b ^ b) = a ^ 0 = a

There are only 128 ASCII character values. So, a simple brute-force, and then by observing the output, you can make out the original string (given that it made sense originally).

When I experimented with the above logic, with arbitrary character 'x', I realized that the decryption made sense 2 times. Once at 'x' and the second time at 'X'. But the thing was, the case had been toggled for 'X'.

This led to some further investigations, and I came to the above conclusions.

6 Unix tools you need to know about

Mithil Poojary — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 11:08:42 +0000

1. column

I, as a programmer, do not mind those nastily formatted tabular data, like...

Pid Name %CPU
1230 Firefox 15
600 Code 12
809 Terminal 1.2

But when I learnt about column, I was pretty fascinated by how easy it is to make it neat!

column <file_name> -t

Pid   Name       %CPU
1230  Firefox    15
600   Code       12
809   Terminal  1.2

2. less

How many times did you feel disgusted by the mess you made on your terminal screen? Maybe you printed a huge file or did ps aux. I have been there.
A very neat solution is to use less. The text is displayed upon applying a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time.

You don't have any clutter on your terminal once you exit less.

3. sort

Imagine having a file with ID and Names like this.

16  Siri
20  Cortana
13  Mithil
9   Jarvis

A quick sort on the IDs would be super helpful right?

sort <file_name> -n

9   Jarvis
13  Mithil
16  Siri
20  Cortana

4. tr

I can't really think of a better situation to use this right now, but hey it works.
Say you have to replace the occurence of a character. tr (translate) does this for you.

echo "This is a sentence" | tr " " "\n"

This
is
a
sentence

5. head and tail

Head and tail themselves are pretty solid tools, but together they have their own use case.

Say you want the 11th line in a text file. You can do this by :

head <file_name> -n 11 | tail -n 1

That was all for this post. What are your preferred helpful Unix tools?

Photo by Karl Pawlowicz on Unsplash