Terminal

This post, my first in quite awhile, is inspired by my good friend Phil. I understand these sorts of changes, and why they give people pause, but I see this as a big step forward. zsh If you haven’t heard of it Z Shell (also known as zsh) it is a modern shell that works in place of a shell like bash (either as a default or in my case post install choice). A shell is a funny thing though: 95% of computer users don’t know about shells at all, 3% know about it but don’t give it much thought (just run what you’re told), and for the last 2% it’s one of the most important parts of a system. ...

pbpaste & pbcopy give you direct access to the OSX clipboard from a shell and makes it easy to tie together data from GUI based apps with command line apps. pbpaste So say you use ⌘+c to copy something from a browser that you want to then feed through a command line tool like ./jq: $ p b p a s t e | j q ‘ . ’ pbpaste feeds the text from the clipboard to jq through standard in, which then allows jq to manipulate it as you see fit. The result gets sent to standard out (or wherever the second tool sends it). ...

I suppose it makes sense that when you work for a company everyone assumes you know everything about using its products. When I worked at Symantecs Managed Security Services people asked me all the time how to use the antivirus. It’s a normal assumption, even if it’s off base. So working at GitHub I get asked git & GitHub questions all the time. #REALTALK: The fact is I’m not a great Git user. I don’t rebase. I’m terrible about using bisect. I had to squash a commit once and it took me an embarrassingly long time. ...

In an effort to improve my “Unix” skills I’m trying to do more and more on the command line, such as writing this blog. This has worked out for me in a lot of ways, making much of my work faster, less environment dependent, and easier to reproduce/script. I’ve learned lots of tricks to help with this, but recently came across one of the best ones: Aspell. First a confession: people get into the computer industry for lots of reasons. My reasons were kind of different: I couldn’t spell and have terrible handwriting. In 4th grade being told this magic box would make my ideas legible and spelled correctly was game changing for me. But I digress. ...

So as initially suggested I haven’t been good about blogging yet. I’ve been quite busy with work. But I did want to pass along one small tip I’ve picked up. A lot of the work I’ve been doing has been a combination of Ruby/Python and command line data parsing. In much of this shell I’m working through JSON documents on the command line, often using commands like: $ cat foo.txt | grep “foo” | sort | uniq I’ve learned a lot about composing commands and the beauty of the Unix philosophy, it’s been great. But I hit a lot of issues with some tools that initially spit out “ugly”, overly terse JSON: ...