I’m looking for a new RSS reader. I’ve tried subscribing to blogs via email. Now I have tons of emails which I don’t have the time to read. I’d rather use RSS again. I can collect the blogs I want in a central place. When I have time, I can skim through new entries and decide which ones catch my interest. I don’t want to self-host. I self-hosted a selfoss instance once but it was a hassle to maintain.

Today I learned about the i3 scratchpad. The scatchpad is a special i3 window. You can use it as a window that opens your favorite program, e.g., a music player or editor. Examples:

Make the currently focused window a scratchpad bindsym $mod+Shift+minus move scratchpad # Show the first scratchpad window bindsym $mod+minus scratchpad show The first command moves the current window to the scratchpad and makes it invisible. With the second command you open the scratchpad and cycle through all windows.

I’ve been thinking today on how to improve my workflow. At the moment, coding is purely a side-project for me. I have a day job as a tax officer and two young kids. I love programming and learning new concepts, but I have a limited amount of time that I can spend on coding. There are tons interesting aspects, programming languages, frameworks and concepts that I would love to explore.

There are a lot of tools in the npm ecosystem that you need to run in your project. For example, firebase-tools or heroku. If you read the documentation, those tools require you to install them globally: npm install -g firebase-tools Now you can execute the binary from everywhere, for example: firebase init. But it’s recommended to install packages locally instead of globally 1. Updating a global package would make all your projects use the new release, and as you can imagine this might cause nightmares in terms of maintenance, as some packages might break compatibility with further dependencies, and so on.

Today I found a cool trick on the Vim SubReddit: how to quickly create ordered lists. Here’s a screen-cast by rnevius: Steps Let’s say that you have a list: one item another item it’s an item Use <C-v> (CTRL + V), then I to select all lines at the start of the line and add a 0. in front of each: 0. one item 0. another item 0.

Spotify TUI is a Spotify client for the terminal, written in Rust. In conjuction with Spotifyd, a lighteight Unix daemon, you’ll get a fully-featured terminal application that connects to your Spotify Premium account. Install Spotifyd Installation There are pre-build libraries for different operating systems. For Arch, you can either use the spotifyd or spotifyd-full. I use pulseaudio as my sound server, so I chose spotifyd-full from the AUR: yay -S spotifyd-full Installation takes a while.

I’ve re-installed my laptop from scratch with Manjaro Architect, using the i3 community edition. My laptop has a touchpad, an ETPS/2 Elantech. It doesn’t work out of the box. i3 is a tiling window manager, so I have to find a way to configure the touchpad. For i3, it makes sense to use the X11 configuration. Create a new file in the folder /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. In my case, there already was a file called 30-touchpad.