walk, python meets excel, gitlab meets the fediverse
25 Aug 2023walk
This is a cd/ls replacement lets you travese your filesystem using arrow keys and fuzzy search. It includes a preview option that you can have open while traversing. You can then open a file in your favorite editor (set with the EDITOR environment variable).
Note there is currently a bug where if installed via snap the open-in-editor feature doesn’t work.
It also doesn’t elegantly handle opening a directory where the user doesn’t have permission to read the contents. I had an error get thrown but I imagine this relatively young project will push support for this soon.
Overall I see this as a replacement for cd/ls in the scenario where you’re looking through files. I don’t think I would naturally use it when I was strictly cd/ls-ing to a single known file or directory, but if I was cd/ls-ing through a bunch of files which I was inspecting, I can see using this with the preview enabled.
Repo: https://github.com/antonmedv/walk
Python in Excel
Microsoft is bringing Python into Excel. There are always a lot of haters out there when it comes to Excel, but I think this will help people dip their toes in the world of software development. At some of my previous jobs I had to use Excel a lot and while I’m really glad I don’t have to anymore, I think this would have been a great way to get started programming without angering my corporate overlords.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ofsE7xiGho
Gitlab embraces the Fediverse
Okay I know this is two “company meets open source” stories in a row but I think this is a really cool development. Gitlab is going to start supporting the ActivityPub protocol (on which Mastodon, Bluesky, Lemmy and Pixelfed are based) in a few different ways. If you search the issues at their core repo you can see a number of relevant issues and discussions. The one I’m specifically linking to below is about leveraging the protocol for cross-server merge requests. To summarize the idea:
- You have an account on
gitlab.myserver.ca. - You fork a project hosted on
gitlab.comusing your account fromgitlab.myserver.ca. - You make edits and make a merge request from your fork to the original project.
If you imagine this being implemented on other git hosts like Github, it would allow you to self-host a git account and still contribute to projects hosted on other servers. I’m excited to see where it goes.