Welcome to the lab.

I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur. In that post, I mentioned that you could remove that delay in Finder using the command defaults write com.apple.Finder NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0. But that only affects Finder, and you have to repeat it with various bundle identifiers for each app making use of the Big Sur toolbar layout.

I have since realized you can set this globally for all apps in one fell swoop:

defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

As far as I can tell, that seems to have done the trick. Just thought I’d update with the new info. I’ve updated the older post as well.

I was browsing my gists recently and found one I’d totally forgotten about, which is somewhat ironic given its purpose: scheduling short-term reminders with alarms from the Terminal. I posted it about it back in 2016, but eventually it fell into disuse, as a lot of my just-playing-with-an-idea scripts tend to.

This one was actually pretty cool, though, and I’ve started using it again. You just run something like dontforget to get ready for dinner in 30m in Terminal, and in 30 minutes, you get a reminder in the form of a “ding” and your computer saying “Time to get ready for dinner.” It has LaunchBar integration for large display text.

I don’t know why I ever decided that Bash scripting was the efficient way to write this one. It definitely isn’t. But I stuck with it and updated it a little bit.

You can now use “at 3pm” or “at 10:30am” type strings to set a specific time. The meridian (am or pm) is required. This only works within 24 hours of the current time.

I also added an AppleScript display dialog if you don’t have the LaunchBar integration enabled. Oh, and for some reason I thought it deserved smarter display of the time, so instead of “in 128 minutes,” it says “in 2 hours 8 minutes”.

Contrary to what I wrote in my original post on this, it will actually work fine if you quit the Terminal session you launched it in (assuming you didn’t force it to run in the foreground, but why would you do that, really?).

This little script really isn’t meant to be used for much beyond a quick reminder within a few hours. I use it when I tell my girlfriend I just need to take care of a quick coding problem I thought of in the evening after I’m supposed to be done for the day. “I’ll be back in 20 minutes, I promise.” When I sit down I run dontforget to get back to your beautiful girlfriend in 20m and my Mac will make sure I’m not a liar.

You can find the updated script in the gist. Feel free to leave comments there if you think of additions or fixes it needs! By the way, I’m using Fish as my shell these days, but this works fine as long as it has the bash shebang on the script.

Backstory: my co-host on Overtired, Christina Warren, has a constantly growing collection of repositories she’s starred on GitHub. As a developer advocate for a Big Tech company, she always keeps her finger on the pulse of the new and cool developer stuff, and her stars serve as a curated list of “projects to watch.” It came up on an episode a while ago, and I decided we should have a way to display the latest ones.

The Overtired site uses WordPress, so even though I’m not doing a lot of WordPress development these days, I figured I’d dust off my PHP skills and whip up a plugin for this. It’s pretty barebones, but it does the job, and you can plug in any username to get their latest stars as a widget.

You can see it in action on overtiredpod.com, all the way down in the footer. I actually have never tried it as a sidebar widget, but it’s really simple markup and I’m just assuming it will work.

As with a lot of my little side projects, this one has a finite audience. A convergence of GitHub users who think their stars are worth sharing and happen to be running a WordPress blog. If that describes you, I have just the thing.

Check out the project page for more details. I doubt this will ever see many updates, but it’s tested with WP 5.7 and should be good for the foreseeable future.

(I would add this to the WordPress plugin directory for fun, but you still have to set everything up in Subversion and I don’t even have svn installed these days, let alone remember how to use it. If it were a bigger project, I might consider it, but it’s just not worth it.)

A buddy of mine is ramping up his command-line fu lately. He’s a thorough notetaker, and he’s taken to commenting his shell code immaculately. I applaud this. He mentioned that he really liked this particular formatting for describing what each flag/switch in a command does:

I dug it, but my first though was how tedious it would be to type out, even with handy TextExpander snippets. So I made a thing. A silly little thing of limited utility, to be sure. But a thing.

The “Comment Flags” Service will simply scan a line for a grouping of characters following a dash, e.g. the “ltr” in ls -ltr *.md. It will then output a “diagram” for comments like what you see above (minus the actual comments), ready to be filled in.

It will work for multiple groupings (or even multiple single flags). For example, it provides this, ready for all the explaining:

It ignores long flags. They’re more descriptive anyway, but I might add some formatting for those in the future.

Figured I’d share this, just in case it scratches anyone else’s itch.

By the way, TextBuddy (this week’s gracious sponsor) can run Services now. That means things like this Service, all of the Markdown Service Tools, and even SearchLink can all work in TextBuddy from a single popup palette alongside its own extensive toolset. It’s a secret setting you have to enable from Terminal, but if you’re curious scroll down this page a bit. You know, to the part where Tyler says in 21pt type “Please Don’t Tell Anyone About This…”