Welcome to the lab.

You’ve probably heard me mention fzf before. It’s an amazing command line tool created by Junegunn Choi. It takes a list of data and turns it into a command line menu with fuzzy searching, multi-select, and can even preview each item in whatever way is appropriate. I’ve been using it in all kinds of scripts — where I used to have rudimentary numbered menus, I now have much friendlier and more flexible terminal navigation.

fzf is available via Homebrew, just run brew install fzf. See man fzf for very good documentation.

One great example of how fzf can change your command line life is the set of keybindings for git shared by the author. With these set up you can, for example, start typing a git command that requires a commit hash, hit Ctrl-G Ctrl-H, and get a searchable menu of all your commits. Select the one you’re looking for and the menu closes and the commit’s hash is inserted in your command. It’s crazy handy.

I’ve pushed Doing 2.0 out to the world. It’s the result of a year or so of tinkering on and off, with some extra love recently, and it comprises enough refactoring, fixes, and improvements to truly warrant the major version bump.

I’ve had a few manic episodes in recent months that have found me obsessively coding on personal projects for hours at a time. I’ve put out new releases of Marked 2 and Bunch, updated multiple open source projects, and spent a ton of time on projects at the day job. So much so that it’s been… (glances at homepage)… a month since I blogged.

I work on myriad projects, but Doing is always the common denominator. No matter what project I find myself hacking away at, I’m constantly tracking my time and progress using Doing. (I even use git commit hooks to add entries to my log whenever I make a commit in one of my projects.) And when I’m in “obsessive coding mode,” every time I use Doing, I think of new things I wish it could do. (Things I wish Doing did? Was doing?) Anyway, a thousand side-tracks to work on Doing have culminated in the first major version bump since its initial release.

To catch you up, Doing is my command line tool for tracking what I’m spending my time on. It has tools for adding entries, tagging them, searching them, tracking time, and outputting reports in various formats. It stores all of this in a plain text file using (slightly proprietary) TaskPaper formatting, easy to port and parse elsewhere.

The project page on this site used to have documentation for all of Doing’s commands and options, but trying to continue fitting it all on one page got very unruly. The documentation has been reorganized and moved to the Doing wiki on GitHub. (If you just want an overview of all possible commands, I did a little RDOC->Markdown conversion to generate an All Commands wiki page.)

There’s so much new stuff that I can’t fit it all into an announcement post like this. Read on for the highlights, though.

If you’d rather play than read, just run gem install doing to get the latest version (2.0.11 as of this writing). Then run doing help to see all available commands, and run doing help COMMAND to get info on each one. I’ve tried to keep it as self-documenting as possible.

First of all, there have been some major updates to Doing over the last few weeks (changelog), so be sure to update to the latest version (gem update doing). If you don’t know what Doing is and started reading this post anyway, go check it out first.

I’ve been playing with incorporating Doing into my iTerm status bar. It’s already in my Touch Bar, but having it right below my prompt in my terminal seemed super handy. The method I’m using might seem a bit convoluted, but it’s working great.

This whole thing is based around iTerm’s user variables and interpolated strings. Once set, the variable can be used in status bars, window titles, session badges, etc. You just have to keep it updated, so some hooks are required. Here’s how I got it working.

I’ve done a lot of coding in the last two weeks. Playing with projects, adding features, fixing bugs, writing tests. I’ve done a lot of learning Vim (I’m writing this post in Vim, I think I like it). Some day I’ll feel like I’ve learned something in Vim that would actually surprise anybody and I’ll write it up. For now, I’m just playing catch up.

Wellness check

We’ll do this Overtired style, mental health corner at the top of the show…

I had a few manic days last week and am riding out this lull before depression hits. I’ve had depression that wasn’t preceded by mania, but I’ve never had mania that wasn’t followed by depression. Oh, in case you missed it, I’m bipolar. And I’m trying to talk about it more because, well, it’s scary to talk about.

I’m also ADHD, which can be a horrible combination. One symptom of ADHD is hyperfocus, where you can focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others. The problem is, that one thing is almost never the thing that most needs focus at the time. And when I’m manic, hyperfocus goes into overdrive and I have even less control than usual of where it goes.

I actually managed to focus pretty well on day job stuff. Set some impressive precedents that will definitely bite me when the inevitable downturn happens. Hopefully it will be manageable. I gotta get stabled out.

In the meantime, and in addition to doing a great job at work, I updated a bunch of projects. Here’s a rundown.