Author Archives: luke

colout

Posted on May 25, 2020 by luke

colout is an interesting tool: like grep but different. The idea is to highlight lines (or parts of lines) that match a particular pattern. Sadly, it won’t build in my environment, and I don’t understand python well enough to figure … Continue reading →

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Diff Tools, Redux

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Some time ago, I mentioned here how I like to use colordiff. Well, on a Mac I actually prefer Apple’s FileMerge GUI diff tool, which is is part of the Xcode command line tools, and accessible from the command line … Continue reading →

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File renaming tools

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Long ago, I wrote a utility (brename) that renames a set of files based on a supplied pattern. (Imagine you had an arbitrary set of JPEGs and you wanted to pretend they all came from a digital camera with names … Continue reading →

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Visidata

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I stumbled onto visidata. I’ve got tons of csv files and the ability to view them quickly at the command line is a huge win. But this thing is amazing. Csv files are the tiny tip of a huge iceberg. … Continue reading →

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pipx

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I’m not a python person. But some interesting CLI utilities are written in python, including eyeD3 and visidata. Enter pipx – it creates little (huge?) pip sandboxes for your different utilities, so you don’t have to worry about one breaking … Continue reading →

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Duff – duplicate file finder

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I’ve got this folder called vast/todo/t.temp that’s got a 100 GB of stuff from old computers in it. Typically, I just copy stuff there and tell myself I’ll get back to it. There are 61,287 files, none less than a … Continue reading →

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Extracting Text from Word DOCX files using Pandoc

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Back in the day, I would use antiword to extract the text from a Word .DOC file. But it only understands DOC. Over the years, more and more Word files have been using the “open” (ha ha) DOCX format, which … Continue reading →

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Macports Cheatsheet

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I used to use homebrew, but before that I used MacPorts. (And long, long, before that, fink.) The past year or two I’ve come back to MacPorts. But I forget what the commands are. (Honestly, I get them confused with … Continue reading →

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iTunes Misbehavior (Part 934)

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I still use iTunes sync my iPhone periodically to my computer (mainly so I can retrieve photos off the phone). Every time I do, I get to watch this: It copies several hundred unchanged songs back onto my phone. This … Continue reading →

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Useful gems, 2020 edition

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Since the gem ecosystem keeps changing, and since I don’t write new programs very often, here’s a list of my favorite gems for developing command-line interface tools. Option parsing gem: slop. (Since micro-optparse looks moribund; see here.) But (looking at … Continue reading →

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