Tools

Over the past few weeks I’ve been developing and using a personal command-line tool called gwt (Git Worktree) to manage Git repositories using worktrees. This article explains what the tool does, how it evolved, and how I used GitHub Copilot CLI to develop it (in fact the idea of building the script was also to test the tool). The Problem: Managing Multiple BranchesI was working on a project with multiple active branches, including orphans; the regular branches are for fixes or features, while the orphans are used to keep copies of remote documents or store processed versions of those documents. The project also uses a special orphan branch that contains the scripts and the CI/CD configuration to store and process the external documents (it is on a separate branch to avoid mixing its operation with the main project code). The plan is trigger a pipeline against the special branch from remote projects to create or update the doc branch for it in our git repository, retrieving artifacts from the remote projects to get the files and put them on an orphan branch (initially I added new commits after each update, but I changed the system to use force pushes and keep only one commit, as the history is not really needed). The original documents have to be changed, so, after ingesting them, we run a script that modifies them and adds or updates another branch with the processed version; the contents of that branch are used by the main branch build process (there we use git fetch and git archive to retrieve its contents). When working on the scripts to manage the orphan branches I discovered the worktree feature of git, a functionality that allows me to keep multiple branches checked out in parallel using a single .git folder, removing the need to use git switch and git stash when changing between branches (until now I’ve been a heavy user of those commands). Reading about it I found that a lot of people use worktrees with the help of a wrapper script to simplify the management. After looking at one or two posts and the related scripts I decided to create my own using a specific directory structure to simplify things. That’s how I started to work on the gwt script; as I also wanted to test copilot I decided to build it using its help (I have a pro license at work and wanted to play with the cli version instead of integrated into an editor, as I didn’t want to learn a lot of new keyboard shortcuts). The gwt Philosophy: Opinionated and Transparentgwt enforces a simple, filesystem-visible model: Exactly one bare repository named bare.git (treated as an implementation detail)One worktree directory per branch where the directory name matches the branch nameSingle responsibility: gwt doesn’t try to be a general git wrapper; it only handles operations that map cleanly to this layout...

For a long time I’ve been using the Terminator terminal emulator on Linux machines, but last week I read a LWN article about a new emulator called Ghostty that looked interesting and I decided to give it a try. The author sells it as a fast, feature-rich and cross-platform terminal emulator that follows the zero configuration philosophy. Installation and configurationI installed the debian package for Ubuntu 24.04 from the ghostty-ubuntu project and started playing with it. The first thing I noticed is that the zero configuration part is true; I was able to use the terminal without a configuration file, although I created one to change the theme and the font size, but other than that it worked OK for me; my $HOME/.config/ghostty/config file is as simple as: font-size=14 theme=/usr/share/ghostty/themes/iTerm2 Solarized Light...

I’ve always been a fan of template engines that work with text files, mainly to work with static site generators, but also to generate code, configuration files, and other text-based files. For my own web projects I used to go with Jinja2, as all my projects were written in Python, while for static web sites I used the template engines included with the tools I was using, i.e. Liquid with Jekyll and Go Templates (based on the text/template and the html/template go packages) for Hugo. When I needed to generate code snippets or configuration files from shell scripts I used to go with sed and/or envsubst, but lately things got complicated and I started to use a command line application called tmpl that uses the Go Template Language with functions from the Sprig library. tmplI’ve been using my fork of the tmpl program to process templates on CI/CD pipelines (gitlab-ci) to generate configuration files and code snippets because it uses the same syntax used by helm (easier to use by other DevOps already familiar with the format) and the binary is small and can be easily included into the docker images used by the pipeline jobs. One interesting feature of the tmpl tool is that it can read values from command line arguments and from multiple files in different formats (YAML, JSON, TOML, etc) and merge them into a single object that can be used to render the templates. There are alternatives to the tmpl tool and I’ve looked at them (i.e. simple ones like go-template-cli or complex ones like gomplate), but I haven’t found one that fits my needs. For my next project I plan to evaluate a move to a different tool or template format, as tmpl is not being actively maintained (as I said, I’m using my own fork) and it is not included on existing GNU/Linux distributions (I packaged it for Debian and Alpine, but I don’t want to maintain something like that without an active community and I’m not interested in being the upstream myself, as I’m trying to move to Rust instead of Go as the compiled programming language for my projects). Mini JinjaLooking for alternate tools to process templates on the command line I found the minijinja rust crate, a minimal implementation of the Jinja2 template engine that also includes a small command line utility (minijinja-cli) and I believe I’ll give it a try on the future for various reasons: I’m already familiar with the Jinja2 syntax and it is widely used on the industry.On my code I can use the original Jinja2 module for Python projects and MiniJinja for Rust programs.The included command line utility is small and easy to use, and the binaries distributed by the project are good enough to add them to the docker container images used by CI/CD pipelines.As I want to move to Rust I can try to add functionalities to the existing command line client or create my own version of it if they are needed (don’t think so, but who knows)....

On recent weeks I’ve had some time to scratch my own itch on matters related to tools I use daily on my computer, namely the desktop / window manager and my text editor of choice. This post is a summary of what I tried, how it worked out and my short and medium-term plans related to them. Desktop / WMOn the desktop / window manager front I’ve been using Cinnamon on Debian and Ubuntu systems since Gnome 3 was published (I never liked version 3, so I decided to move to something similar to Gnome 2, including the keyboard shortcuts). In fact I’ve never been a fan of Desktop environments, before Gnome I used OpenBox and IceWM because they where a lot faster than desktop systems on my hardware at the time and I was using them only to place one or two windows on multiple workspaces using mainly the keyboard for my interactions (well, except for the web browsers and the image manipulation programs). Although I was comfortable using Cinnamon, some years ago I tried to move to i3, a tilling window manager for X11 that looked like a good choice for me, but I didn’t have much time to play with it and never used it enough to make me productive with it (I didn’t prepare a complete configuration nor had enough time to learn the new shortcuts, so I went back to Cinnamon and never tried again). Anyway, some weeks ago I updated my work machine OS (it was using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I updated it to the 24.04 LTS version) and the Cinnamon systray applet stopped working as it used to do (in fact I still have to restart Cinnamon after starting a session to make it work) and, as I had some time, I decided to try a tilling window manager again, but now I decided to go for SwayWM, as it uses Wayland instead of X11. Sway configurationOn my ~/.config/sway/config I tuned some things: Set fuzzel as the application launcher.Installed manually the shikane application and created a configuration to be executed always when sway is started / reloaded (I adjusted my configuration with wdisplays and used shikanectl to save it).Added support for running the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr service.Enabled the swayidle command to lock the screen after some time of inactivity.Adjusted the keyboard to use the es key mapAdded some keybindings to make my life easier, including the use of grimm and swappy to take screenshotsConfigured waybar as the environment bar.Added a shell script to start applications when sway is started (it uses swaymsg to execute background commands and the i3toolwait script to wait for the #!/bin/sh # VARIABLES CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE="$HOME/.config/google-chrome/Local State" I3_TOOLWAIT="$HOME/.config/sway/scripts/i3-toolwait" # Functions chromium_profile_dir() { jq -r ".profile.info_cache|to_entries|map({(.value.name): .key})|add|.\"$1\" // \"\"" "$CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE" } # MAIN IGZ_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@intelygenz.com")" OURO_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@nxr.global")" PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "stalens@gmail.com")" # Common programs swaymsg "exec nextcloud --background" swaymsg "exec nm-applet" # Run spotify on the first workspace (it is mapped to the laptop screen) swaymsg -q "workspace 1" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} "spotify" # Run tmux on the swaymsg -q "workspace 2" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} -- foot tmux a -dt sto wp_num="3" if [ "$OURO_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} -m ouro-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$OURO_PROFILE_DIR" wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" fi if [ "$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} -m igz-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR" wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" fi if [ "$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} -m personal-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR" wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" fi # Open the browser without setting the profile directory if none was found if [ "$wp_num" = "3" ]; then swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} google-chrome wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" fi swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} evolution wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} slack wp_num="$((wp_num+1))" # Open a private browser and a console in the last workspace swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} -- google-chrome --incognito ${I3_TOOLWAIT} foot # Go back to the second workspace for keepassxc swaymsg "workspace 2" ${I3_TOOLWAIT} keepassxc...