#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
msgid "title: \"ANN: remembering - Add memory to dmenu, fzf and similar tools\""
msgstr ""
msgid "date: 2021-01-26"
msgstr ""
msgid "layout: post"
msgstr ""
msgid "lang: en"
msgstr ""
msgid "ref: ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools"
msgstr ""
msgid "Previous solution"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"I previously used [yeganesh](http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/) fill this gap, but "
"as I started to rely less on Emacs, I added fzf as my go-to tool for doing "
"fuzzy searching on the terminal. But I didn't like that fzf always showed "
"the same order of things, when I would only need 3 or 4 commonly used files."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"For those who don't know: yeganesh is a wrapper around dmenu that will "
"remember your most used programs and put them on the beginning of the list "
"of executables. This is very convenient for interactive prolonged use, as "
"with time the things you usually want are right at the very beginning."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"But now I had this thing, yeganesh, that solved this problem for dmenu, but "
"didn't for fzf."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"I initially considered patching yeganesh to support it, but I found it more "
"coupled to dmenu than I would desire. I'd rather have something that knows "
"nothing about dmenu, fzf or anything, but enhances tools like those in a "
"useful way."
msgstr ""
msgid "Implementation"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"Other than being decoupled from dmenu, another improvement I though that "
"could be made on top of yeganesh is the programming language choice. Instead"
" of Haskell, I went with POSIX sh. Sticking to POSIX sh makes it require "
"less build-time dependencies. There aren't any, actually. Packaging is made "
"much easier due to that."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"The good thing is that the program itself is small enough ([119 "
"lines](https://git.euandreh.xyz/remembering/tree/remembering?id=v0.1.0) on "
"v0.1.0) that POSIX sh does the job just fine, combined with other POSIX "
"utilities such as "
"[getopts](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/getopts.html),"
" [sort](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/sort.html) "
"and "
"[awk](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html)."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"The behaviour is: given a program that will read from STDIN and write a "
"single entry to STDOUT, `remembering` wraps that program, and rearranges "
"STDIN so that previous choices appear at the beginning."
msgstr ""
msgid "Where you would do:"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"$ seq 5 | fzf\n"
"\n"
" 5\n"
" 4\n"
" 3\n"
" 2\n"
"> 1\n"
" 5/5\n"
">\n"
msgstr ""
msgid "And every time get the same order of numbers, now you can write:"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf\n"
"\n"
" 5\n"
" 4\n"
" 3\n"
" 2\n"
"> 1\n"
" 5/5\n"
">\n"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"On the first run, everything is the same. If you picked 4 on the previous "
"example, the following run would be different:"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf\n"
"\n"
" 5\n"
" 3\n"
" 2\n"
" 1\n"
"> 4\n"
" 5/5\n"
">\n"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"As time passes, the list would adjust based on the frequency of your "
"choices."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"I aimed for reusability, so that I could wrap diverse commands with "
"`remembering` and it would be able to work. To accomplish that, a "
"\"profile\" (the `-p something` part) stores data about different runs "
"separately."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"I took the idea of building something small with few dependencies to other "
"places too:"
msgstr ""
msgid "the man pages are written in troff directly;"
msgstr ""
msgid "the tests are just more POSIX sh files;"
msgstr ""
msgid "and a POSIX Makefile to `check` and `install`."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"I was aware of the value of sticking to coding to standards, but I had past "
"experience mostly with programming language standards, such as ECMAScript, "
"Common Lisp, Scheme, or with IndexedDB or DOM APIs. It felt good to "
"rediscover these nice POSIX tools, which makes me remember of a quote by "
"[Henry Spencer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#cite_note-3):"
msgstr ""
msgid "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
msgstr ""
msgid "Usage examples"
msgstr ""
msgid "Here are some functions I wrote myself that you may find useful:"
msgstr ""
msgid "Run a command with fzf on `$PWD`"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"f() {\n"
" profile=\"$f-shell-function(pwd | sed -e 's_/_-_g')\"\n"
" file=\"$(git ls-files | \\\n"
" remembering -p \"$profile\" \\\n"
" -c \"fzf --select-1 --exit -0 --query \\\"$2\\\" --preview 'cat {}'\")\"\n"
" if [ -n \"$file\" ]; then\n"
" # shellcheck disable=2068\n"
" history -s f $@\n"
" history -s \"$1\" \"$file\"\n"
" \"$1\" \"$file\"\n"
"fi\n"
"}\n"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"This way I can run `f vi` or `f vi config` at the root of a repository, and "
"the list of files will always appear on the most used order. Adding `pwd` to"
" the profile allows it to not mix data for different repositories."
msgstr ""
msgid "Copy password to clipboard"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"choice=\"$(find \"$HOME/.password-store\" -type f | \\\n"
" grep -Ev '(.git|.gpg-id)' | \\\n"
" sed -e \"s|$HOME/.password-store/||\" -e 's/\\.gpg$//' | \\\n"
" remembering -p password-store \\\n"
" -c 'dmenu -l 20 -i')\"\n"
"\n"
"\n"
"if [ -n \"$choice\" ]; then\n"
" pass show \"$choice\" -c\n"
"fi\n"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"Adding the above to a file and binding it to a keyboard shortcut, I can "
"access the contents of my [password store](https://www.passwordstore.org/), "
"with the entries ordered by usage."
msgstr ""
msgid "Replacing yeganesh"
msgstr ""
msgid "Where I previously had:"
msgstr ""
msgid "exe=$(yeganesh -x) && exec $exe\n"
msgstr ""
msgid "Now I have:"
msgstr ""
msgid "exe=$(dmenu_path | remembering -p dmenu-exec -c dmenu) && exec $exe\n"
msgstr ""
msgid "This way, the executables appear on order of usage."
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"If you don't have `dmenu_path`, you can get just the underlying `stest` tool"
" that looks at the executables available in your `$PATH`. Here's a juicy "
"one-liner to do it:"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"$ wget -O- https://dl.suckless.org/tools/dmenu-5.0.tar.gz | \\\n"
" tar Ozxf - dmenu-5.0/arg.h dmenu-5.0/stest.c | \\\n"
" sed 's|^#include \"arg.h\"$|// #include \"arg.h\"|' | \\\n"
" cc -xc - -o stest\n"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"With the `stest` utility you'll be able to list executables in your `$PATH` "
"and pipe them to dmenu or something else yourself:"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"$ (IFS=:; ./stest -flx $PATH;) | sort -u | remembering -p another-dmenu-exec"
" -c dmenu | sh\n"
msgstr ""
msgid "In fact, the code for `dmenu_path` is almost just like that."
msgstr ""
msgid "Conclusion"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"For my personal use, I've packaged `remembering` for [GNU "
"Guix](https://git.euandreh.xyz/euandreh-guix-channel/about/) and "
"[Nix](https://git.euandreh.xyz/dotfiles/tree/nixos/not-on-"
"nixpkgs/remembering.nix?id=0831444f745cf908e940407c3e00a61f6152961f). "
"Packaging it to any other distribution should be trivial, or just "
"downloading the tarball and running `[sudo] make install`."
msgstr ""
msgid "Patches welcome!"
msgstr ""
msgid ""
"Today I pushed v0.1.0 of [remembering](https://remembering.euandreh.xyz), a "
"tool to enhance the interactive usability of menu-like tools, such as "
"[dmenu](https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and "
"[fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)."
msgstr ""
#~ msgid ""
#~ "Today I pushed v0.1.0 of "
#~ "[remembering](https://git.euandreh.xyz/remembering/about/), a tool to "
#~ "enhance the interactive usability of menu-like tools, such as "
#~ "[dmenu](https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and "
#~ "[fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)."
#~ msgstr ""
#~ msgid ""
#~ "Today I pushed v0.1.0 of [remembering](https://remembering.euandreh.xyz), a "
#~ "tool to enhance the interactive usability of menu-like tools, such as "
#~ "[dmenu](https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) and "
#~ "[fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)."
#~ msgstr ""
