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Search - "command line tools"
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When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.
Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.
So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.
Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.
The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.14 -
It's more than a story bear with me.
Open source world is big enough to scare a beginner like me, which happened when I started with my first contribution in the year 2015. So many platforms, lot of organisations, freaking images of coding languages, pull request, issues and bugs- these all were enough to freak me out.
The only thing which motivated me to stay and know about the open source technology was to develop my first program using python. I was in great difficulty as when I started writing my program I was stuck after almost every two to three stages of compilation, so I needed guidance. I started my search on Github by creating my repository, pushing my code and following developers. I was amazed to see such a good response from people around me, not only they helped me to debug and fix the issue but they also helped me to understand and build my program from a new perspective. Daily discussions and communication, new issue build up and solving them by the traditional way of GUI further motivated me to learn the Git using the command line tool.
I still remember the year I worked on a repo using the command line tool, it was amazing. Within months or few, the fear of open source tools, community, interaction all just flew away. With this rant I will like to suggest all the beginners and open source enthusiast to just step a foot ahead and ask openly to the world- "I need help" and believe me you will be showered with information and help from all the world.
Happy contribution.8 -
That would probably be implementing multithreading in shell scripts.
https://gitlab.com/netikras/bthread
The idea (though not the project itself) was born back when I still was a sysadmin. Maintaining 30k servers 24/7 was quite something for a team of merely ~14 people. That includes 1st line support as well.
So I built a script to automate most of my BAU chores. You could feed a list of servers - tens or hundreds or more - and execute the same action on each of them (actions could be custom or predefined in the list of templates). Neither Puppet nor Chef or Ansible or anything of sorts was consistently deployed in that zoo, not to mention the corp processes made use of those tools even a slower approach than the manual one, so I needed my own solution.
The problem was the timing. I needed all those commands to execute on all the servers. However, as you might expect, some servers could be frozen, others could be in DMZ, some could be long decommed (and not removed from the listings), etc. And these buggars would cause my solution to freeze for longer than I'd like. Not to mention that running something like `sar -q 1 10` on 200 servers is quite time-consuming itself :)
And how do I get that output neatly and consistently (not something you'd easily get with moving the task to a background with '&'. And even with that you would not know when are all the iterations complete!)?
So many challenges...
I started building the threading solution that would
- execute all the tasks in parallel
- do not write anything to disks
- assign a title to each of the tasks
- wait for all the tasks to complete in either
> the same sequence as started
> as soon as the task finishes
- keep track of each task's
> return code
> output
> command
> sequence ID
> title
- execute post-finish actions (e.g. print to the console) for each of the tasks -- all the tracked properties are to be accessible by the post-finish actions.
The biggest challenges were:
a) how do I collect all that output without trashing my filesystems?
b) how do I synchronize all those tasks
c) how do I make the inception possible (threads creating threads that create their own threads and so on).
Took me some time, but I finally got there and created the libbthread library. It utilizes file descriptors, subshells and some piping magic to concentrate the output while keeping track of all the tasks' properties. I now use it extensively in my new tools - the ones where I can't use already existing tools and can't use higher-level languages.4 -
Holy fuck. Didn't realise how slow Android studio was until I started using visual code with the command line tools. 😮6
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Quote from Docker site: "anyone with Docker and an editor installed can build and debug the app in minutes"
Really? I'm two days in and still can't get this damn thing to work. And no solution in sight. Command line tools... sheesh.7 -
I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.
I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.
All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.
For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.
Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.31 -
I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.
Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.
More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.
So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.
Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.11 -
Him: "I don't need source control, it's just another program that does unknown things on my source files. What if one day it stops working?? How do I get my files??"
Me: "you could say the same thing on 90% of the tools you use every day... Like when you restore npm packages by GUI"
him: "what are those? I don't use them"
Also him: "command line is vintage"2 -
Fuck the brains of circular dependency.
On a fresh install of OS X on my hackintosh.
1) Let me install HomeBrew
2) I need Command Line Tools to install HomeBrew
3) Xcode dmg is on my Android. Opens Android File Transfer tool.
4) Error: File is larger than 4GB. Need to use adb.
5) Need to install android-platform-tools, which contains adb.
6) android-platform-tools is available in brew. Goto 1).
Note: Networking is limited to tethering mobile data as Wifi chip hasn't arrived yet.3 -
What a lazy fuck.
This so called full-stack developer doesn't know how to use mysql from command line. The only way he can do anything in the database is using phpMyAdmin or MySQL gui.
What? How do you even call yourself a developer when you don't know how to use basic command line tools?
The fucker wants me to find out why a particular feature is not working?
Why the fuck are you being paid for? You stupid idiot.
"Can you please grep ... in the server?"
What? Why would I do that for you? How about you ssh the server yourself?
What a waste of time.5 -
I’ve been trying to use Debian without a graphical UI, at least for the most part. I use X window to run firefox since I feel that is the best way to browse. But simply using the terminal for almost everything feels so refreshing somehow.
I start to find these gems such as a music player for the terminal that works really well, my HOME area feels so clutter free and I feel like I finally can finely control and tune my system to a much larger extent. I’m coming from an extensively cluttered windows system so just seeing a few things makes me feel like I can finally focus.
For me it feels like I’ll have an easier time managing my projects by setting up github in a good way in HOME. I’ve been putting more time into my vimrc to make it better for my different workflows and general productivity (and for the sake of minimalism trying to keep it mostly to hand written stuff). I’ve also been looking into Lutris to be able to fire up games or use wine for other necessary tools that I might need during cowork with others.
Generally I believe that if this test works out I’ll truly consider to make this my main OS. The clutterlessness keeps me much more distraction free. The terminal environment make me read about and learn of new ways to do things. And most of the tools I use can either be used from command line, multiple ones with a multiplexer and in the case I truly need to use GUI or want to play a game I can just fire it up on demand.
*happy*
Do you guys have any distraction free OS or setups that you want to share? Anyone with a similar experience of revelation?9 -
How could I only name one favorite dev tool? There are a *lot* I could not live without anymore.
# httpie
I have to talk to external API a lot and curl is painful to use. HTTPie is super human friendly and helps bootstrapping or testing calls to unknown endpoints.
https://httpie.org/
# jq
grep|sed|awk for for json documents. So powerful, so handy. I have to google the specific syntax a lot, but when you have it working, it works like a charm.
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
# ag-silversearcher
Finding strings in projects has never been easier. It's fast, it has meaningful defaults (no results from vendors and .git directories) and powerful options.
https://github.com/ggreer/...
# git
Lifesaver. Nough said.
And tweak your command line to show the current branch and git to have tab-completion.
# Jetbrains flavored IDE
No matter if the flavor is phpstorm, intellij, webstorm or pycharm, these IDE are really worth their money and have saved me so much time and keystrokes, it's totally awesome. It also has an amazing plugin ecosystem, I adore the symfony and vim-idea plugin.
# vim
Strong learning curve, it really pays off in the end and I still consider myself novice user.
# vimium
Chrome plugin to browse the web with vi keybindings.
https://github.com/philc/vimium
# bash completion
Enable it. Tab-increase your productivity.
# Docker / docker-compose
Even if you aren't pushing docker images to production, having a dockerfile re-creating the live server is such an ease to setup and bootstrapping the development process has been a joy in the process. Virtual machines are slow and take away lot of space. If you can, use alpine-based images as a starting point, reuse the offical one on dockerhub for common applications, and keep them simple.
# ...
I will post this now and then regret not naming all the tools I didn't mention. -
iOS dev here
Just wanted to share my experience on updating Xcode and why I schedule 3 hours for this process.
So, updating Xcode via the AppStore has always been flaky at best and ofcouse Xcode needs to be closed first. You hit update, the button turns gray, half an hour in you still see no progress...
That's why I often just download it from the dev center. But since Xcode Ghost the app is also wrapped in a signed container.
So,
Downloading: 10 minutes
Expaning: 60 minutes!!!
After that I move the app in place and fire it up, always have to close my music player first grrr...
After that Gate Keeper verifies the app for another 60 minutes.
Finally Xcode comes to live.
Only need to install new command line tools for another few minutes and I can continue coding.
Wait. Half my day is over!
Why Apple? Why?
#wk242 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.6 -
The ones who use it, what do you like or value about Linux? Why do you use it?
Before I answer, let me say that I am a noob compared to the rest of this community. I run Ubuntu because Arch was too complicated when I tried and bash scripts equal to frustrations for me. That's my knowledge level.
- I don't feel "observed" when using a Linux distro compared to Windows and macOS.
- Feel more connected to the open source thought and the free spirit.
- Feel like I can do anything I want. Learning new programming languages easily, trying out web servers, try and setup own website or mail server etc.
- Everything is accessible. Read something cool about docker? ALT+T to open a terminal and start up a docker container to try out.
- No Internet browsing for software, like googling "Firefox download english".
- Sometimes forces me to learn about the workings of a computer, like networks, servers, routing, firewalls, bootup sequence etc.
- So many great command line tools. Want to find out quickly who owns a website? Want to query a specific DNS server? All possible within 5 seconds!
All in all using Linux feels like watching a documentary while using Windows is more like watching a dumb comedy show where I can turn my brain off, but get more stupid after a while.6 -
I am currently blocked from doing my job by a firewall policy handed down from corporate that prevents WSL2 from connecting to the internet. Three days of no dev environment and counting.
We make linux software to be hosted on linux in linux containers in linux. We use linux command line tools to make it work.
"NO! WE ARE THE ALL-POWERFUL IT DEPARTMENT AND YOU MUST USE WINDOWS BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY."14 -
The Linux sound system scene looks like it was deliberately designed to be useless.
ALSA sees all my inputs and outputs, but it can't be used to learn (or control) anything about software and where their sound goes. Plus it's near impossible to identify inputs and outputs.
PulseAudio does all sorts of things automatically, but it's hard to configure and has high latency.
JACK is very convenient to configure, has great command line tools (like you'd expect from Linux), is scriptable, but it doesn't see things.
Generally, all of these see the others as a single output and a single input, which none of them are.11 -
Started new job almost two moths ago..
For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.
The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.
When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.
Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...
Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.
Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.
Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...
Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...
Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..
I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...
Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..
I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.
Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!14 -
Just started learning gnuplot yesterday. Sure, it's not the shiniest of tools, but I'd heard enough about its performance to give it a go.
It's like learning vim. You Google thrice to write a single functional line. You spend hours trying to find a single command for a single task.
But. GODDAMN. This thing's the fastest plotting framework I've ever dealt with. I love Matplotlib, but as great as its plots are, when I need to plot shit up in half a second, I've found a new friend.
Also, tutorial suggestions appreciated.1 -
Hi, I am an Linux/Unix noobie.
Is there any other command line tools like GREP?
I want to take a look at it and think whetehr it will be great for a small school project or not.5 -
More rants coming up.
1st
Working with a guy who I am not sure has the necessary experience to begin with.
The person who hired him told me to teach the guy for him to catch up to our project and its pace. He has some experience with Java. Which our project is being developed in java in a linux dev environment in a full stack way. So we handle front to infrastructure.
First day working with him and I saw this guy is trouble.
1st - doesn’t know effing git commands. Who doesn’t know git nowadays. Ok i can forgive him for that. But damn this guy’s learning curve is so slow. After s month of joining, he still has to look up the commands in his photo cheatsheet.
2nd - doesn’t know linux basic cli commands like cd, ls, rm. not an ounce of knowledge. He told me he is used to developing in Windows. Now this. I can’t forgive him for not knowing this shit. cd (change dir) even exists in windows command line. He even has guts to say to everyone he wants to try working in our servers. The HORROR!
3rd - not sure if knowing junit and matchers of hamcrest, if you are working with Java is a must. But this guy doesn’t understand Matchers of Junit. How the fuck did he ensure effing quality in his prev work.
All in all, seems like this guy doesn’t understand the basics of current development tools.9 -
What game engine would you recommend to an indie developer? The type who can't afford a fucking server to run the bloated and buggy unity editor but is actually a developer so isn't afraid of typing.
I've had enough of the improper sandboxing (will crash bc of game scripts), tempfile-based crash-unaware instance tracking (won't restart afterwards) and lack of UI scaling (seriously, that's like accessibility/retina support basics) that is the unity editor. If they had command line tools I'd use them happily.10 -
Learned how to make Command Line Tools using python because of this fun weekend project.
Link - https://github.com/itsron717/XKCD1 -
Fuck apple, and fuck xcode.
Making and running android app was a breeze.
Making and running ios app was hell.
Expectation : I should have gotten everything I need just by installing xcode and flutter.
Reality : I need to install these from the terminal : xcode command line tools, homebrew, ruby, cocoapods, firebase-cli. Also I need to manually add many stuffs, such as google login url into xcode project settings. Also we can simply test run our app or install to our device, and iphone we owned, we need to register in apple developer program, fill a full form, blah blah blah.
When it comes to android, I only need to register an account much much later, when I want to publish it to the playstore.5 -
since everybody seems to hate gradle i would like to say how much i like gradle for its possibility to build even big java projects from the commandline without the need of a a lot o scripts and especially the possibility to create a wrapper in order to use it even when its not installed on said machine.
it is the only reason why i am learning java now (i fucking loathe eclipse at the moment).
and regarding its speed. i had both. windows and linux. and for some reason i could only verify its slowliness on windows.1 -
I just don't get it. I've done web stuff for 20 years, but these days I'm expected to learn god knows how many command line tools just to stay relevant in the field. I fear the day I have to leave this crummy company making small websites, I just don't have what it takes to learn all that shit and get a job elsewhere.
Webpack, NodeJS, Angular... when I look at their docs I just get lost in all the jargon and I think to myself: I would rather stock shelves like a chum then learn all this goddamn shit over and over and over, my generation can't afford shit anyway so there is no point in doing the absolute minimum to survive.
Meanwhile the recruiters on LinkedIn all talk like the jobs they have are like a visit to fucking Disneyland compared to the soulless mindfucking grind a job entails. GAHHHH!1 -
I was once working on a grand vision of a suite of analytical tools, which later turned into a single web app, which later turned into a desktop app, which eventually turned into a command line app, which ultimately turned into a background service that writes the results of a small subset of what it was supposed to do into database tables.1
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So I wanted a newer Linux OS for doing certain things at work. I went for Kubuntu 21.04 as it would have reasonably newer software and had the tools I needed for managing exfat partitions. I installed it on a second drive and everything went smoothly. I booted to the OS and it said it needed to do updates. Okay, lets do that. I started them and walked away.
I came back later and it had finished. I rebooted the machine because I needed to run windows. It came up to a prompt and a grub command line. WTF. I am like oh fuck, it didn't just fuck me out of my windows install. So I rebooted into the BIOS. I looked and it now had switched the drive I installed Linux on as the boot drive. That is weird. So I switched the M.2 drive to boot. It went right into Windows.
Kubuntu 21.04 installed on second drive as intended, switched the boot drive to the second drive, and then fucked itself on first update. And people wonder why non-techies don't run Linux. Its a pile of shit only a masochist would love. Because we are the only ones who can possibly sort out shit like this.
I know its probably a webpage away from fixing, but I needed to work in windows and could not be fucked to fix it. Its a distraction to actually getting my work done. Just disappointed in the entire ecosystem.8 -
Laravel, Symfony...
It doesn't seem to matter what framework I pick to learn next. I rarely get past the Installation step where I have to install and learn a bunch of command line tools first.
It makes me realize I no longer want to be a web developer as even the biggest step I can reasonably make in my career will still not result in an income change significant enough to pay for a mortgage, and the smallest step still expects me to understand all of these command line tools for seemingly no payoff whatsoever.
I feel stuck and depressed looking at all the toxic positivity on LinkedIn. I cannot fathom the amount of indoctrination that must be going on between all these people chirping about how great it is to work for their company.6 -
I HATE WINDOWS' WINDOW MANAGEMENT. I have two monitors and nothing can be maximized. Windows' spaces are terrible as well.
I am building in the back end in VS Code.
I have three terminals open because I need them to run multiple parts of the app locally.
I have postman open to try requests.
I have firefox for the orm system's documentation.
I have my database tool running as well.
I have an ERD diagram floating in a window.
I have another VS Code window showing a diff of my JSON compared to the version I'm replacing.
Also all of my team communication tools.
I have never hated shuffling windows around so much. Would it kill us to use some command line tools for http instead of Postman? Could we please get a decent shell in windows? Could we get some simple ways to switch between virtual desktops? Click click click. I can't automate clicking. Why do we use the most clicky tools we can find?17 -
I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.
They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.
WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.
Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.
I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.
The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.
Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.
It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.
I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.
Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.
Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.
I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.1 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
I have to confess: I don't use a version control system. But, as of today, I'd like to change that.
I have a few questions for the community:
What VCS are there and what are the differences? I've heard of Git, but are there any others?
Can you recommend any hosting services? I know of Github and Bitbucket. Are there others? Which is better?
Are there any tools you use? Or just the command line application?
Finally: Can you recommend any tutorials for using these VCS?
Thank you in advance,
Somebody who probably should have done this ages ago (me)8 -
Well it's not exactly a startup idea but something that I and my team built during my first-ever hackathon.
The theme was to build some tools for developers to improve their speed and be more productive.
In our team we were some bunch of students who just knew how to build a basic front end and a little bit of backend and we came up with an application that lets developer query any command line shortcut through his voice and the website will return the keyboard shortcut for that. For example the developer can ask what is the shortcut for splitting the view into two halves in vs code and the website will look it up in database and give back the shortcut
Now when I look back it feels so funny. I still remember that the judges gave us a funny look but they appreciated our efforts as we were too young to be there.. lol
btw If anyone is curious about the project it is present here ..
https://github.com/LaurenAssistant/... -
I've never really understand why i should use tools with bad UI or even command line if it's not really necessary! I'm mean, we've FUCKING 2017, give me a proper UI! I want to work, not search every damn feature of the tool!
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For me that would be Proxmox. I know, people like it - but for no apparent reason it decided to nuke half my ZFS datasets in a pool, with no logic behind it whatsoever. All disks were tested, all came out good. Within the same pool there were datasets that were lost and some that remained.
I really don't get it. Looking at Proxmox' source code, it's more or less the command line tools and then there's the web interface (e.g. https://github.com/proxmox/...). Oh and they have the audacity to use their own file extension. Why not I guess?
Anyway, half my data was gone. I couldn't tell how or why or what the fuck even happened there. But Proxmox runs Debian underneath and I've been rather pissed about Proxmox' idea of "don't touch the host system aaa" for a while at that point. So I figured, fuck it I'll just take pure Debian then and write my own slightly better garbage on top of that. And as such the distribution project was born. I've been working on it for a little over a year now. And I've never had such issues again.
I somewhat get the idea of "don't touch the host" now, but still not quite. Yes, the more you do in the containers, the better. And the less you do on the host in terms of reconfiguration, the longer it will stay alive for. That goes for any system - more reconfiguration means usually means less stability and harder to replace. But sometimes you just have to work from the host. Like say migrating a container between hosts, which my code can do. You can't do that from a container, at all. There are good reasons to work with the host. Proxmox isn't telling that. Do they expect their users to be idiots? Only enterprise sysadmins amirite?
So yeah, that project - while I do take inspiration from it in mine - I don't like it. It's enterprise, it has the ZFS and the Ceph and the LXC and the VM's - woohoo! Not like anyone could implement that on a base Debian system. But they have the configuration database (pmxcfs), the distributed configuration database of a couple MB large and capped there, woah!
Ok sure it isn't Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or whatever, and those are definitely worse. But those are usually vendor lock-ins.. I avoid those on that premise alone :)3 -
Ok, we were troubleshooting a network connection problem. My boss told me: use fping, a small command line utility that gives you a timestamped ping. We can then check when did the connection go down. Ok. Since I've always advocated the importance of knowing advanced scripting tools, i tried to do it with powershell. I've been playing with Test-Connection for an hour to try to get not only the timestamp when the connection is ok, but the timestamp when the connection is down. Don't want to go into details. I've just a question. A solution that allows you to do such an easy task in say 20 lines of code is the proof that the system works or that it doesn't work? To make long story short, now i'm downloading fiping.6
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I think maybe I am doing something wrong.
I have this node.js application I am building with typescript and I wrote tests in mocha. Now I need to make some changes which break quite a few tests.
When I run mocha on the command line the errors whizz past. When I worked in java and .net (with junit and nunit) you could just click a test in the ide to run it. So you could 'fix' one test at a time. Also you could just double click on a fail and it would jump you to the code for that test or the exception that failed.
I found this extension for visual studio code that adds a sidebar to visual studio code. It looked good but now I spent the last hour trying to get it to run typescript tests - looks like it doesn't support the compilers argument.
Surely other developers must do this sort of stuff. I am not using an obscure technology stack right? Do you write automated tests for your codebase? What tools do you use? Should I switch ide? switch testing frameworks? -
Was the standalone android sdk manager, the one that has a gui, a problem for most of the android devs for it to be goddamn removed? The command line sdk manager (tools/bin/sdkmanager) is a fucking pain in the ass for fucks sake.
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I'm trying to find a linux distro that suck less to study the basics of bash, and some c/c++ dev tools. I play around with linux since 2013. But I just can't believe that, still, until today, in gnome, you can't fucking chose a audio output and get to the system to remember on the next reboot.
I mean, it doesn’t fit in my mind this nonsense, if I can only solve this shit on the command line or in a configuration file, why don’t you take that shit off the option and put a plain text explaining how to configure this shit in the right way . Who expects a system to behave like this?
I don't know why someone lost their time implementing something useless, and worst, deceiving.11 -
Thanks to the simplicity of android command line tools I wasted 2 days trying to set it up and then ended up deleting every byte it created to install android studio which comes with its huge IDE which I'm never going to use.
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Git Semantic commits. Any thoughts? I just came across this today. Any tools you could suggest? I came across a command line tool for feat, chore, test, bug, fix etc. by russiann on github should I run with that or something else?
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Let's exclude some files from our coverlet coverage test!
Sure! That's easy, just remember to pass this super short, understandable, and rememberable command-line argument:
-- DataCollectionRunSettings.DataCollectors.DataCollector.Configuration.ExcludeByFile="**/myFile.cs/**"
You're fucking kidding me, right?
It's 2022 and tools are still using PowerShell syntax... just kill me1