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diff --git a/_articles/2021-01-26-ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools.md b/_articles/2021-01-26-ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47263d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/_articles/2021-01-26-ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools.md @@ -0,0 +1,191 @@ +--- + +title: "ANN: remembering - Add memory to dmenu, fzf and similar tools" + +date: 2021-01-26 + +layout: post + +lang: en + +ref: ann-remembering-add-memory-to-dmenu-fzf-and-similar-tools + +--- + +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://git.euandreh.xyz/remembering/about/ +<!-- [remembering]: https://remembering.euandreh.xyz --> +[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://git.euandreh.xyz/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 man pages 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][guix-channel] and [Nix][nix-file]. Packaging it to any other distribution should be trivial, or just downloading the tarball and running `[sudo] make install`. + +Patches welcome! + +[guix-channel]: https://git.euandreh.xyz/euandreh-guix-channel/about/ +[nix-file]: https://git.euandreh.xyz/dotfiles/tree/nixos/not-on-nixpkgs/remembering.nix?id=0831444f745cf908e940407c3e00a61f6152961f |