The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Magical shell history & why engineers should focus on writing (News)

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Ellie Huxtable's Atuin makes your shell history magical, Dmitry Kudryavtsev writes why he thinks engineers should focus on writing, LazyVim promises to transform your Neovim setup into a full-fleged IDE, Geoff Graham shares with Smashing Magazine how he writes CSS in 2023 & Brad Fitzpatrick collects a public list of bad issue track behaviors.

What up nerds? It's your boy! I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, July 17th, 2023. We are happy to announce that despite recent Red Hat drama, we here at Changelog News are dedicated to remaining bug-for-bug compatible with our upstream sources. Did you see what I did there? Okay, let's get into the news. During our Efficient Linux at the CLI episode,

I revealed my recently closed Ctrl-R knowledge cap. But there's so much I didn't know, and then I realized you could up arrow to old commands, and I was like, okay, now we're talking, you know? And I learned the history command, so then I realized you could take history, which is your history of commands you've typed before. And then you could like pipe it to grab and search for something. You like, you start to kind of learn these things slowly, but that was

back in like the early two thousands. And I'm telling you just a few months ago, I learned about control R, which, which like all nerds already know about, but I just didn't like somehow I just never knew about it. And you can just like start typing out and fuzzy match and hit enter. And you, anyways, my efficiency is up, you know, even after 20 years of doing this stuff, like in the last year, I just like doubled. And so I was reading that and I was like, okay, Daniel's onto something here. There's so much efficiency gains you can have if you just have someone tell you, here's how to do it. Embarrassing, right? This prompted Matt Lehrer to point me towards Atuin by Ellie Huxtable. Atuin is a command line tool that enables you to make better use of your shell by giving control R

superpowers. Every line you write is stored, ready to be queried and run again at any point from any machine you wish. You can even sync your history between all of your machines and search it from anywhere. How does Atun do it? By replacing your existing shell history with a SQLite database. Then recording additional contacts for each command and syncing that DB, fully end-to-end encrypted, via a server Ellie hosts or set up your own. Shut up and take my money! Here's Dimitri Kudraisev.

Quote, Today writing is so underrated that most people want to avoid it. But the truth is, you will have to write. Comments, documentation, design documents, presentations, whether you like it or not. So why not become better at it? End quote. Dimitri goes on to outline three reasons why every engineer should write more.

One, writing is a way to organize your brain. Two, writing is a way to learn something. Three, writing helps you identify mistakes. I have to agree with him, and it's astonishing to me how many people we talk to on our shows who can link their career success, directly or indirectly, to writing prose in addition to code. Dimitri finishes up with how to write more, including this unpopular opinion. He says, abolish the copy and paste. Oh no you didn't! Lazy Vim promises to transform your NeoVim setup into a full-fledged IDE with dozens of hand-picked plugins pre-installed,

easy customization with Lazy.envim, and sane default settings for options, auto-commands, and keymaps. If you've heard me talking about Vim and NeoVim lately, my common refrain is that too much time and effort is wasted getting it up to par with modern alternatives like VS Code. I'd just rather be coding. However, projects like LazyVim remove that upfront cost and make getting started with Vim a much less daunting proposition. That means LazyVim is a great place to start if that's something you're interested in. Let's do some sponsored news. Is it time for a new password manager? Passbolt's Shelby Lee Dubik thinks so. Quote,

End quote. Passbolt offers 100% asymmetric end-to-end security, backed by OpenPGP, and packed with features for businesses and teams in mind. Read all about it by following the link in your show notes and chapter data. Thank you to Passbolt for sponsoring this week's ChangeLog News. And thank you to Shelby for writing up why she thinks it's time for a new password manager. CSS is evolving faster than ever. Don't take my word for it. Take Chris Coyier's.

It's almost a silly time to not be writing about CSS because there's maybe never been a hotter time and how fast CSS is dropping new stuff and stuff that there is to talk about and explore. Or take Chris's old CSS Tricks collaborator, Jeff Grams. He wrote an excellent article for Smashing Mag all about modern CSS and the features that have had the most influence on his current approach to the declarative styling language.

Quote, I for one am stoked beyond all heck about how CSS is evolving. Many of the latest features are ones we've craved for many, many years. And indeed, there are several of them finding their way into my CSS. Again, not drastically, but enough that I'm enjoying writing CSS more now than ever. Let me count the ways. End quote. He covers container queries, layered styles, is and where, the new color function syntax, user preferences, and more, followed by a list of features Jeff is not using. Brad Fitzpatrick has been involved in FOSS communities

like Memcached, OpenID, Go, and others for over 25 years, so he's seen his share of bad behavior on public issue trackers. You did not just say that. He started collecting a public list of those behaviors that we should all read, because one, misery loves company, and two, if you do any of these things, please stop. Please clap. The blaster, the adder, The duper. The template ignorer. The cookie licker.

The, well, I'll let you check the full list before somebody else has to check it for you. You better check yourself or you'll wreck yourself cause I'm bad for your health. I come real stealth dropping bombs on your mouth. That is the news for now. Adam and I interviewed Steve Yegge on Friday, and it was so much fun. He's chock full of great stories and told a couple previously untold Bezos tales. That episode drops on Wednesday, and on Friday, we're hanging out with Brian Cantrell and Steve Tuck from Oxide Computer.

They recently shipped out their first rack, and we're going to celebrate. Have a great week. Share Changelog with your friends if you dig it, and we'll talk to you again real soon.