DEV Community: WessCoby

qotm: a programming quote in your terminal, with its source checked

WessCoby — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 22:10:14 +0000

Programming has a canon of one-liners: premature optimization, the two hard things, testing shows the presence of bugs. Look one up and you'll find it on dozens of sites, rarely with a source, and sometimes credited to someone who never said it.

I found that out about my own project. The first qotm (2019) shipped 110 quotes with no sources; when I checked them this year, 7 were credited to the wrong person and 36 couldn't be traced at all. I wrote about that here: https://wesscoby.com/blog/seven-out-of-a-hundred-and-ten

So qotm 2 is a rebuild around sources: it prints one quote in your terminal, but only ones that have been checked.

npm i -g qotm
qotm --source

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and
education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
—  Edsger W. Dijkstra
   On the nature of Computing Science, 1984 · cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/…/EWD896.html

How a quote gets in

Every quote has a public history on qotm.dev:

Submitted by someone, with whatever source they have.
Verified: a verifier finds the original (the book and page, the paper, the talk, the mailing-list post) and checks the wording. A quote with only second-hand sources is marked needs evidence; one that turns out to be someone else's is rejected or re-credited.
Curated: a curator picks it for the next release against a short checklist (on topic, readable in a terminal, not a duplicate, will still read well in five years).

If a quote's wording turns out to be wrong, the fix is public: the quote page shows the earlier wording and the date it changed.

The starting corpus came from Wikiquote, using only the quotes its editors file as sourced, and treating its Disputed and Misattributed sections as a blocklist. The current release has 502 curated quotes across 25 topics, from programming and Unix to science and the history of computing.

The CLI

No account, no network, no dependencies. The curated dataset is a 350 KB SQLite file inside the npm package, read with Node's built-in node:sqlite (Node 22.16 or 24+). That makes it fast enough to run in every new shell:

command -v qotm >/dev/null && qotm   # end of ~/.zshrc

A few more commands:

qotm --topic debugging     # one topic
qotm --author dijkstra     # one author
qotm save                  # favorite the last quote, kept locally
qotm sync                  # fetch the latest release, checked against its sha256
qotm login                 # optional: sync favorites with qotm.dev

Every command is at qotm.dev/cli.

The dataset is open

Releases are versioned SQLite files with a manifest (size, sha256, what was added, corrected or withdrawn). Quote texts from Wikiquote stay under CC BY-SA 4.0 with credit to its contributors; the code is MIT. Everything is on GitHub: the CLI, the web app, the API and the corpus pipeline.

Put it on your profile

https://qotm.dev/today.svg is the quote of the moment drawn as a terminal card, for a GitHub profile README:

![Quote of the moment](https://qotm.dev/today.svg)

Help wanted

The most useful thing you can send is a misattribution: a quote you know was never said by the person named. Report it on the quote's page and it goes to a verifier. You can also submit quotes, or your own lines, at qotm.dev.

Github CLI: An Introduction

WessCoby — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 11:47:04 +0000

Earlier this year, Github announced the beta version of Github CLI, a new command-line tool for developers. This tool, according to the team, is supposed to reduce context switching and help the developer run their entire workflow right from the terminal. Cool right? #LetsTalkAboutIt

Scenario

In your local repository, you use git in the terminal for staging, committing, and pushing changes to your remote repository. Once you're done, you then switch to Github in the browser for tasks like managing issues, pull requests, etc

Now imagine having to do this about fifty times a day (or even more), coupled with the stress from the actual job - coding and debugging. Now that's something

Enter Github CLI

Github CLI offers a solution to this problem. You can perform all the browser-related tasks and even more, right in the terminal - you don't have to switch. In addition, you get access to an API that you can use to customize your experience. But enough of the chit chat. Let's dive into using gh

Installation

Detailed installation instructions are available in the README

Windows

MSI installers are available for download on the releases page.

# Via Scoop
scoop bucket add github-gh https://github.com/cli/scoop-gh.git
scoop install gh

# Via Chocolatey
choco install gh

Mac OS

# Via Homebrew
brew install gh

# Via MacPorts
sudo port install gh

Linux

# Debian, Ubuntu Linux (apt)
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key C99B11DEB97541F0
sudo apt-add-repository https://cli.github.com/packages
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gh

For other Linux distros, please visit the install instructions page

Getting Started

Check version to ensure it installed correctly. You should get response as below

gh version

# gh version 1.0.0 (2020-09-16)
# https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Authentication

gh auth login

The authentication process is quite smooth. The first prompt asks you to choose between Github and Github Enterprise. Then you will choose either to authenticate via the web browser or paste in a GitHub token (if you have a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable set, it will be used).

Commands

The commands are pretty straight forward and easy to understand and use

gh help
Work seamlessly with GitHub from the command line.

USAGE
  gh <command> <subcommand> [flags]

CORE COMMANDS
  gist:       Create gists
  issue:      Manage issues
  pr:         Manage pull requests
  release:    Manage GitHub releases
  repo:       Create, clone, fork, and view repositories

ADDITIONAL COMMANDS
  alias:      Create command shortcuts
  api:        Make an authenticated GitHub API request
  auth:       Login, logout, and refresh your authentication
  completion: Generate shell completion scripts
  config:     Manage configuration for gh
  help:       Help about any command

FLAGS
  --help      Show help for command
  --version   Show gh version

EXAMPLES
  $ gh issue create
  $ gh repo clone cli/cli
  $ gh pr checkout 321

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
  See 'gh help environment' for the list of supported environment variables.

LEARN MORE
  Use 'gh <command> <subcommand> --help' for more information about a command.
  Read the manual at https://cli.github.com/manual

FEEDBACK
  Open an issue using 'gh issue create -R cli/cli'

Let's take the repo subcommand, for instance:

gh repo --help
Work with GitHub repositories

USAGE
  gh repo <command> [flags]

CORE COMMANDS
  clone:      Clone a repository locally
  create:     Create a new repository
  fork:       Create a fork of a repository
  view:       View a repository

INHERITED FLAGS
  --help   Show help for command

ARGUMENTS
  A repository can be supplied as an argument in any of the following formats:
  - "OWNER/REPO"
  - by URL, e.g. "https://github.com/OWNER/REPO"

EXAMPLES
  $ gh repo create
  $ gh repo clone cli/cli
  $ gh repo view --web

LEARN MORE
  Use 'gh <command> <subcommand> --help' for more information about a command.
  Read the manual at https://cli.github.com/manual

Cloning a repository https://github.com/OWNER/REPO:

gh repo clone OWNER/REPO

# if you own the repo, all you need is the repo name
gh repo clone REPO

Let's explore the alias subcommand

gh alias --help
Aliases can be used to make shortcuts for gh commands or to compose multiple commands.

Run "gh help alias set" to learn more.


USAGE
  gh alias [flags]

CORE COMMANDS
  delete:     Delete an alias
  list:       List your aliases
  set:        Create a shortcut for a gh command

INHERITED FLAGS
  --help   Show help for command

LEARN MORE
  Use 'gh <command> <subcommand> --help' for more information about a command.
  Read the manual at https://cli.github.com/manual

Let's set an alias il for listing issues on a repo and use it to access issues list on my repo wesscoby/wesscoby:

gh alias set il 'issue list' 

# - Adding alias for il: issue list
# ✓ Added alias.

~                                                                              
gh alias list

# co:  pr checkout
# il:  issue list


gh il --repo wesscoby/wesscoby

# Showing 2 of 2 open issues in wesscoby/wesscoby

#3  Fix Portfolio links     about 3 days ago
#2  Resume Download Link

As you can see, the tool is very well documented, providing rich user experience.
You can also access the docs website for more.

Conclusion

This is indeed a great tool made by developers for developers like myself, who enjoy working in the terminal.