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+---
+
+title: ANN: remembering - Add memory to dmenu, fzf and similar tools
+
+date: 2021-01-26
+
+categories: ann
+
+---
+
+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].
+
+## Previous solution
+
+I previously used [yeganesh][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.
+
+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.
+
+But now I had this thing, yeganesh, that solved this problem for dmenu, but didn't for fzf.
+
+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.
+
+[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][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].
+
+[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.
+
+Where you would do:
+
+```shell
+$ seq 5 | fzf
+
+  5
+  4
+  3
+  2
+> 1
+  5/5
+>
+```
+
+And every time get the same order of numbers, now you can write:
+
+```shell
+$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
+
+  5
+  4
+  3
+  2
+> 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:
+
+```shell
+$ seq 5 | remembering -p seq-fzf -c fzf
+
+  5
+  3
+  2
+  1
+> 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 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]:
+
+> Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
+
+[poor-unix]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#cite_note-3
+
+## Usage examples
+
+Here are some functions I wrote myself that you may find useful:
+
+### Run a command with fzf on `$PWD`
+
+```shellcheck
+f() {
+  profile="$f-shell-function(pwd | sed -e 's_/_-_g')"
+  file="$(git ls-files | \
+            remembering -p "$profile" \
+                        -c "fzf --select-1 --exit -0 --query \"$2\" --preview 'cat {}'")"
+  if [ -n "$file" ]; then
+    # shellcheck disable=2068
+    history -s f $@
+    history -s "$1" "$file"
+  "$1" "$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.
+
+### Copy password to clipboard
+
+```shell
+choice="$(find "$HOME/.password-store" -type f                  | \
+            grep -Ev '(.git|.gpg-id)'                           | \
+            sed -e "s|$HOME/.password-store/||" -e 's/\.gpg$//' | \
+            remembering -p password-store \
+                        -c 'dmenu -l 20 -i')"
+
+
+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/
+
+### Replacing yeganesh
+
+Where I previously had:
+
+```shell
+exe=$(yeganesh -x) && exec $exe
+```
+
+Now I have:
+
+```shell
+exe=$(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:
+
+```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:
+```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
+
+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`.
+
+Patches welcome!
+
+[packaged]: https://euandre.org/git/package-repository/
+[nix-file]: https://euandre.org/git/dotfiles/tree/nixos/not-on-nixpkgs/remembering.nix?id=0831444f745cf908e940407c3e00a61f6152961f