Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

264 posts about #workflow surprise

Firefox Custom Search Shortcuts

In addition to the built in search shortcuts in firefox, you can also add custom shortcuts in the settings.

This lets you override your default search engine by prepending a keyword in your address bar (like @google, @duckduckgo, @kagi). It's a quick shortcut if you want to search for something on a specific site. The wikipedia one (@wiki) is especially neat in that it'll take you straight to the wikipedia page if there's a direct hit, no results page you need to go through first.

image

Firefox Builtin Search Shortcuts

Firefox has built in search shortcuts in the address bar, making it easy to search through your bookmarks, tabs, history and actions you can perform.

image

In the address bar (which you can focus with Cmd + L), including the following characters in your search will:

  • * search within your bookmarks
  • % search within your tabs
  • ^ search within your history
  • > search within actions - like Manage bookmarks, View downloads, Take a screenshot

The neat thing is you don't need to start your search with the shortcut, you can add it anywhere. So you can start typing something in the address bar, remember you visited the page yesterday, and add ^ at the end to filter down to your history.

Docs

Place a cursor at ALL occurrences in Visual Studio

One of the nice things about working with Visual Studio based text editors is its multi-cursor abilities. For those who don't know, you can highlight a word and pressing CMD+D you can place another cursor at the next occurrence of that string.

This is helpful for making a lot of changes at once. Here's an example where we can fix a typo that was made all throughout a file:

typo = getTypo

if(typo)
    # do something with the typo
else
    # do something else
end

def getTypo()
  typo
end

Well, what if we want a cursor at every occurrence of a typo, but we want a faster way than pressing CMD+D a bunch of times?

TLDR
Just highlight the word you want to grab and press CMD+Shift+L and it will grab all occurrences found in that file. (Just be careful and make sure that's what you actually want!)

Prevent display from falling asleep on MacOS

If you want to prevent your display from going to sleep while you are doing something that doesn't require input, you can use caffeinate -d

For me this was useful when running a longer script that I wanted to keep an eye on while I was debugging. By running caffeinate -d in a terminal I was able to prevent the display from sleeping, saving me from pressing a button or moving the mouse all the time.

Screenshot Single Window in macOS

It feels like there are an absurd number of options with the built in macOS screenshot tool.

We've seen before you can screenshot the entire screen or select a rectangle and save them as a file or to your clipboard.

Today I Learned there's an option to select an individual window and screenshot the entire window.

You can do this by hitting CMD + shift + 4 (with or without ctrl), then tap space. The cursor will change to a camera, and then you can click on the windows you wish to screenshot!

image

Looks much better than when I try to crop by hand.

3 ways to clear the terminal

Option 1:
Simply typing the terminal command clear will clear your terminal. This method preserves your current terminal session, meaning you can scroll up to see what was cleared away.

Option 2:
Pressing CTRL+L to clear away the terminal. This behaves essentially the same as the clear command, preserving your terminal session.

Option 3:
Pressing CMD+K to clear away the terminal. This behaves similarly to the other 2 options, except that it does not preserve your session.


h/t Vinicius Negrisolo

Tables in Markdown

To create tables in a markdown file, you can use this syntax:

| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3|
| --- | --- | --- |
| Content 1 | Content 2 | Content 3 |
| Content 4 | Content 5 | Content 6 |

And this will output something like this, depending on what you are using to interpret the markdown:

image


I find this to be useful when displaying side-by-side images in a Github PR

Here is a silly example:

Post Office (B&W) Post Office (Colorized)
image image

h/t Vinicius Negrisolo

Run Script on Login/Start in Windows

You can automatically run a script on Windows during login by placing files in your users "Programs\Start Up" folder. It's useful for running *.bat scripts.

You can easily access this location by opening the "Run" dialog - Windows + r and typing shell:startup.

If you're an admin, you can also set this for all users by typing shell:common startup, which will open the shared Start Up folder.

If this is too much, you can also accomplish a similar thing by creating a "Scheduled Task". In the Windows search bar, type "Task Scheduler". Open this then click "Actions" -> "Create Task"

ANSI Escape Codes

Today I learned that ANSI Escape Codes are a thing.

I was writing some Rails migrations and wanted nice readable output and a quick way to tell how things were going. So, I wanted some colored text to be displayed as output. This was how I learned about ANSI Escape Codes.

In short, you want to escape your string using \e then give it the prefix [ and then give it a series of codes to format your text.

For example, you can color all further text green using the code 32m or red using 31m.
If you want text to go back to normal give it the code 0m.

Here is an example: image

You can do other formatting than just color, but I found these to be helpful for what I needed and I didn't realize how simple it was.

Markdown alert style content blocks on Github

Use special markdown to emphasize content inside alert style content blocks on Github.

> [!NOTE]  
> Highlights information that users should take into account, even when skimming.

> [!TIP]
> Optional information to help a user be more successful.

> [!IMPORTANT]  
> Crucial information necessary for users to succeed.

> [!WARNING]  
> Critical content demanding immediate user attention due to potential risks.

> [!CAUTION]
> Negative potential consequences of an action.

image

Add metadata to Stripe webhooks using TwiML <Pay>

This is kind of a specific TIL, but hopefully it saves somebody else the time it took me to find the answer.

If you are using the TwiML <Pay> verb there is a noun on <Pay> called <Parameter> which lets you pass parameters to your action.

If your payment provider is Stripe and you want to send custom metadata, you can send a <Parameter> with a name prefaced as metadata_ and it will be added to the Stripe metadata that gets sent out in the webhook.

Here's an example:

<Pay paymentConnector="stripe"> 
   <Parameter name="metadata_testKey" value="value" /> 
</Pay>

and now the object you receive in your webhook will have the following:

"metadata": {
  "testKey": "value"
}

Custom email routing in Github

Is your Github account attached to multiple organizations? Does your primary address associated with Github get inundated with emails/notifications you don't care to find in your personal inbox?

Let me help you out by sorting your Github notification life. Get an email address to which you can flow relevant notifications and associate them with your Github account. Then head on over to Github > Settings > Notifications > Custom Routing

Click "Add new route" and choose an organization and an email address associated with your account.

Github custom routing settings page for notifications

As you can see, I have my primary email address with Github. Still, now all relevant notifications from Hashrocket projects will funnel into my Hashrocket email address.

Log into Github CI server using SSH

Have you ever needed to log into your Github CI run? Is it a flaky test that's hard to reproduce, and the logging output could be more helpful?

You can log into the CI run while it's going. Try out the Github action Debugging with SSH. Utilizing upterm and Tmux, allows for a session that can be logged into.

Add a step like this to your workflow:

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Setup upterm session
      uses: lhotari/action-upterm@v1

A cool feature is that it lets you lock down who can log in via SSH keys. Add a limit-access-to-* declaration like so:

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Setup upterm session
      uses: lhotari/action-upterm@v1
      with:
        ## limits ssh access and adds the ssh public key for the user which triggered the workflow
        limit-access-to-actor: true
        ## limits ssh access and adds the ssh public keys of the listed GitHub users
        limit-access-to-users: githubuser1,githubuser2

Then, you can log in via your workflow's 'checks' panel.

h/t JackC

Site-specific searching from the address bar

In Chromium based web-browsers (Chrome, Brave, etc.) go into your settings and search for site search.

Once you find the settings, click on Add under Site Search. This will give you a form like so:

image

Search engine is the name that will be displayed in the address bar when searching

Shortcut is the string you type in the address bar that will begin the site-specific searching

URL is the desired search url, putting %s where your search terms will go.

For example, searching through all of the TILs can be done with 

https://til.hashrocket.com/?q=%s

Now with this in place, you should be able to something like the following, to quickly view all TILs on a certain topic:

til vim

image

Now you can enjoy easily learning about the thousands of things all the Hashrocketeers have learned for themselves over the years!

How to remove timestamp on screenshots in MacOS

When you take screenshots on MacOS they are saved with a rather long name, like Screenshot 2023-10-18 at 4.13.56 PM

To remove the timestamp making the names shorter just enter this in your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture "include-date" 0

After doing that go ahead and run this:

killall SystemUIServer

Now your screenshots will just be saved as Screenshot and successive screenshots in the same directory will have a number appended to them. (i.e Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, etc.)

How to change the screenshot location on MacOS

By default, screenshots on MacOS are saved to the Desktop. To change this to a specific directory:

First, bring up the screenshot utilities by pressing CMD + SHIFT + 5.
Next, click on the Options selector.
Finally, choose a location under Save to

Note: Here is where you can set your screenshot to be on a timer, choose whether or not you want the mouse/cursor to show up on the screenshots, and a change few other options.

Skip auto updates for brew install/upgrade/tap

I think we've all been there. You're right in the middle of something, you need to brew install a formula, you go to install the formula, and then all of a sudden you're greeted with:

Running `brew update --auto-update`...

and so now you have to wait for all of your formulae to update, just so you can use the one that you need.

Well, if you're in a rush or on a slow internet connection, you can skip the auto update by setting the env var HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE to 1.

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install <formula>

You might find it helpful to throw this into an alias so that you can brew install without updates when you're in a rush, without needing to remember the name of the env var.

From the official docs:

HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE:
If set, Homebrew will not auto-update before running brew install, brew upgrade or brew tap.

Place screenshot straight to clipboard on Mac

Taking a screenshot is super helpful and there are many ways to do it. My go to on the Mac is the keyboard shortcut cmd+shift+4. This brings up a crosshair to select which part of the screen you want.

When you're done selecting you the image will be added to wherever you've configured screenshots to go. Normally the default is directly to your Desktop.

To add this screenshot directly to your pastebin you can do an alternate shortcut of cmd+ctrl+shift+4. Then you can just paste the image wherever as soon as you're done. This is awesome but is a hard keystroke for me. However I discovered that you can use the original cmd+shift+4 to activate the crosshair but it can be redirected to the pastebin if you hold ctrl before you click to finalize the screenshot'd section.

Hooray!

Modifier Keys with Hot Corners

If you don't know what Hot Corners are, check out this post.

Say you want to utilize the Hot Corner for Lock Screen, but don't want to type in your password every time you accidentally hit the corner of your screen. Well, you can add modifier keys when selecting a hot key.

To do this, simply hold down your preferred modifier key (Command, Shift, Option, or Control , or a combination of these keys) while selecting a shortcut from the dropdown. Now whenever you move your pointer into the corner of the screen, your shortcut won't fire unless you're also holding down that modifier key.

MacOS Hot Corners

On macOS you can take advantage of Hot Corners, which are shortcuts activated by moving your pointer into a corner of the screen.

Currently, you can only select from a handful of options, such as Mission Control, Launchpad, Lock Screen, Quick Note and a few others.

To customize each of the four corners, on macOS Ventura 13, it can be found under System Settings->Desktop & Dock->Hot Corners

If you're on a different version, you can see exactly where the setting is located here.

Easily connect to postgres via proxy with service

A client has their RDS postgresql databases locked down to only allow connection from their EC2 instances. I found an easy way to connect with my local clients.

Add a local forward to ssh config

In ~/.ssh/config add something like

Host prod.client
  User ubuntu
  Hostname prod-ec2-instance.example.com
  LocalForward localhost:5433 rds-gibberish.us-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com:5432
  IdentityFile ~/production-ec2-key.pem

Add the credentials to pg service

In ~/.pg_service.conf save the user, database name, and password

[client-prod]
host=localhost
port=5433
user=rds-user
dbname=client-production
password=blablabla

Now you can start your ssh tunnel in 1 terminal:

ssh prod.client

And connect with any postgres client tool (pg_dump, psql, etc.) in another:

psql service=client-prod

warning

Well you just saved a production password to a plain text file, and now you can easily connect and muck things up in production. Make sure your machine is secure and be careful and stuff.

Android crash logs

You can get android crash logs with adb

adb logcat --buffer=crash 

03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime: FATAL EXCEPTION: main
03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime: Process: expo.modules.mymodule.example, PID: 23769
03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime:    at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:448)
03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime:    at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:810)
03-30 07:53:59.221 23769 23769 E AndroidRuntime: Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetE