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authorEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2025-03-31 21:51:40 -0300
committerEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2025-03-31 21:51:40 -0300
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--- a/src/content/blog/2021/01/26/remembering-ann.adoc
+++ b/src/content/blog/2021/01/26/remembering-ann.adoc
@@ -1,55 +1,60 @@
----
+= ANN: remembering - Add memory to dmenu, fzf and similar tools
-title: "ANN: remembering - Add memory to dmenu, fzf and similar tools"
+:remembering: https://euandreh.xyz/remembering/
+:dmenu: https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/
+:fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
-date: 2021-01-26
+Today I pushed v0.1.0 of {remembering}[remembering], a tool to enhance the
+interactive usability of menu-like tools, such as {dmenu}[dmenu] and {fzf}[fzf].
-layout: post
+== Previous solution
-lang: en
+:yeganesh: https://dmwit.com/yeganesh/
-ref: ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools
+I previously used {yeganesh}[yeganesh] to 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.
----
+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.
-Today I pushed v0.1.0 of [remembering], a tool to enhance the interactive usability of menu-like tools, such as [dmenu] and [fzf].
+But now I had this thing, yeganesh, that solved this problem for dmenu, but
+didn't for fzf.
-## Previous solution
+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.
-I previously used [yeganesh] to 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.
+== Implementation
-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.
+:v-010: https://euandre.org/git/remembering/tree/remembering?id=v0.1.0
+:getopts: https://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/getopts.html
+:sort: https://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/sort.html
+:awk: https://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html
+:spencer-quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#cite_note-3
-But now I had this thing, yeganesh, that solved this problem for dmenu, but didn't for fzf.
+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.
-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.
+The good thing is that the program itself is small enough ({v-010}[119 lines] on
+v0.1.0) that POSIX sh does the job just fine, combined with other POSIX
+utilities such as {getopts}[getopts], {sort}[sort] and {awk}[awk].
-[remembering]: https://euandreh.xyz/remembering/
-[dmenu]: https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/
-[fzf]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
-[yeganesh]: http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/
-
-## Implementation
-
-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.
-
-The good thing is that the program itself is small enough ([119 lines] on v0.1.0) that POSIX sh does the job just fine, combined with other POSIX utilities such as [getopts], [sort] and [awk].
-
-[119 lines]: https://euandre.org/git/remembering/tree/remembering?id=v0.1.0
-[getopts]: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/getopts.html
-[sort]: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/sort.html
-[awk]: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html
-
-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.
+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.
Where you would do:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
$ seq 5 | fzf
5
@@ -59,11 +64,12 @@ $ seq 5 | fzf
> 1
5/5
>
-```
+----
And every time get the same order of numbers, now you can write:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
5
@@ -73,11 +79,13 @@ $ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
> 1
5/5
>
-```
+----
-On the first run, everything is the same. If you picked 4 on the previous example, the following run would be different:
+On the first run, everything is the same. If you picked 4 on the previous
+example, the following run would be different:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
5
@@ -87,31 +95,36 @@ $ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
> 4
5/5
>
-```
+----
As time passes, the list would adjust based on the frequency of your choices.
-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.
-
-I took the idea of building something small with few dependencies to other places too:
-- the manpages are written in troff directly;
-- the tests are just more POSIX sh files;
-- and a POSIX Makefile to `check` and `install`.
+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.
-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][poor-unix]:
+I took the idea of building something small with few dependencies to other
+places too: - the manpages are written in troff directly; - the tests are just
+more POSIX sh files; - and a POSIX Makefile to `check` and `install`.
-> Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
+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
+{spencer-quote}[Henry Spencer]:
-[poor-unix]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#cite_note-3
+____
+Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
+____
-## Usage examples
+== Usage examples
Here are some functions I wrote myself that you may find useful:
-### Run a command with fzf on `$PWD`
+=== Run a command with fzf on `$PWD`
-```shellcheck
+[source,shellcheck]
+----
f() {
profile="$f-shell-function(pwd | sed -e 's_/_-_g')"
file="$(git ls-files | \
@@ -124,14 +137,18 @@ f() {
"$1" "$file"
fi
}
-```
+----
-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.
+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.
-### Copy password to clipboard
+=== Copy password to clipboard
-```shell
+:pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/
+
+[source,shell]
+----
choice="$(find "$HOME/.password-store" -type f | \
grep -Ev '(.git|.gpg-id)' | \
sed -e "s|$HOME/.password-store/||" -e 's/\.gpg$//' | \
@@ -142,49 +159,57 @@ choice="$(find "$HOME/.password-store" -type f | \
if [ -n "$choice" ]; then
pass show "$choice" -c
fi
-```
-
-Adding the above to a file and binding it to a keyboard shortcut, I can access the contents of my [password store][password-store], with the entries ordered by usage.
+----
-[password-store]: https://www.passwordstore.org/
+Adding the above to a file and binding it to a keyboard shortcut, I can access
+the contents of my {pass}[password store], with the entries ordered by usage.
-### Replacing yeganesh
+=== Replacing yeganesh
Where I previously had:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
exe=$(yeganesh -x) && exec $exe
-```
+----
Now I have:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
exe=$(dmenu_path | remembering -p dmenu-exec -c dmenu) && exec $exe
-```
+----
This way, the executables appear on order of usage.
-If you don't have `dmenu_path`, you can get just the underlying `stest` tool that looks at the executables available in your `$PATH`. Here's a juicy one-liner to do it:
+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:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
$ wget -O- https://dl.suckless.org/tools/dmenu-5.0.tar.gz | \
tar Ozxf - dmenu-5.0/arg.h dmenu-5.0/stest.c | \
sed 's|^#include "arg.h"$|// #include "arg.h"|' | \
cc -xc - -o stest
-```
+----
+
+With the `stest` utility you'll be able to list executables in your `$PATH` and
+pipe them to dmenu or something else yourself:
-With the `stest` utility you'll be able to list executables in your `$PATH` and pipe them to dmenu or something else yourself:
-```shell
+[source,shell]
+----
$ (IFS=:; ./stest -flx $PATH;) | sort -u | remembering -p another-dmenu-exec -c dmenu | sh
-```
+----
In fact, the code for `dmenu_path` is almost just like that.
-## Conclusion
+== Conclusion
-For my personal use, I've [packaged] `remembering` for GNU Guix and Nix. Packaging it to any other distribution should be trivial, or just downloading the tarball and running `[sudo] make install`.
+:packaged: https://euandre.org/git/package-repository/
-Patches welcome!
+For my personal use, I've {packaged}[packaged] `remembering` for GNU Guix and
+Nix. Packaging it to any other distribution should be trivial, or just
+downloading the tarball and running `[sudo] make install`.
-[packaged]: https://euandre.org/git/package-repository/
-[nix-file]: https://euandre.org/git/dotfiles/tree/nixos/not-on-nixpkgs/remembering.nix?id=0831444f745cf908e940407c3e00a61f6152961f
+Patches welcome!