HiPhish's Workshop

Dotfiles were a mistake

Published: 2020-08-30

Unix has a clever trick for hiding a file from being displayed by the ls command or other file browsers: just prefix the file name with a period character. Many applications use this fact in order to place hidden files or directories in the user’s home directory, usually containing settings, cached files, persistent data and whatever else developers might come up with. This practice has always struck me as just plain wrong, and I am glad that my sentiment was confirmed by Rob Pike years ago.

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The best language to learn programming

Published: 2020-08-02

What is the best first language when learning how to program? There have been many opinions over the years, each with their own selling point: BASIC was created for beginners, Python is executable pseudocode, JavaScript runs everywhere on the web, and so on. However, I would argue that the truly best language has been right under our nose the whole time: the Unix shell.

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Macho, the man command on steroids

Published: 2020-05-31

The Unix man command can open a manual page if you know its name, and the apropos command can search through the manuals if you are looking for a specific word. Let’s put the two to work together into a command I like to call macho: the man command on steroids.

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How I manage SSH connections

Published: 2020-05-23

I have a number of machines I need to connect to via the secure shell (SSH), and typing in the IP address or host name by hand every time get tedious very quickly. I could use an application for that, but that’s bloat. Let’s instead see how we can leverage small universal tools to build an elegant solution of our own instead.

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De-Bootsrapping the workshop, part 2

Published: 2020-02-29

About a year ago I wrote about the first step in de-Bootstrapping my website, where I made my site layout independent of the Bootstrap CSS framework. I have now finally removed Bootstrap entirely from the website.

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Project-local Vim settings the right way

Published: 2020-02-08

Sometimes you want to have a set of Vim settings specific only to a certain project. There are many tips out there how to achieve such a setup, but most of them expose the user to serious security risks. I am going to describe the fundamental problem and how to solve it. TL;DR: use the vim-addon-local-vimrc plugin.

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Learn Vim Script in Y minutes

Published: 2020-02-01

My article for the website Learn X in Y minutes about Vim scripting has been accepted; the article teaches you how to get started with Vim’s built-in custom scripting language in a very concise manner. It has been quite an enjoyable topic to write about and I even ended up learning a few new tricks myself.

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Switching themes automatically in lightline.vim

Published: 2019-09-21

I have recently switched my Neovim setup to use lightline.vim and at the same time I was experimenting with colour schemes. Getting lightline to switch colours along with the rest of the editor is non-trivial, but I think I have figured it out, so I am going to share my setup.

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What is a programmable programming language?

Published: 2019-06-22

When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have gotten so used to metaprogramming in Lisp that they seem to forget that it is either an entirely alien concept to people, or something people have been burned by too often (like every C programmer).

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Understanding 2D rotation matrices

Published: 2019-06-20

When I first a^2 + b^2 learned about rotation matrices they appeared quite “magic”; if you squinted your eyes a bit it sort of made sense, and if you did the math you could prove that the matrix does indeed perform the rotation and that all the group properties are met, but none of that explains where that form comes from, why it works. In this blog post I will explore a way to derive the formula for rotation matrices step by step. If you wish to follow along you need only basic knowledge of linear algebra and trigonometry.

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