m0oN__

Hi I'm Max, I write code sometimes, I'm a linux enthusiast, ricer, and music producer.

[samdashh-deactivated20210615]

on some real shit who wanna like come snuggle and watch movies

[whhyyyyxdddhackme122]

i have made my bed now i will cry in it

[manfromth3m0on-blog]

Auto-Compiling markdown for a live preview

Now, I really like markdown, but there can be some annoyances when it comes to viewing you'r finished product. In a lot of cases it is nice to see you'r result as you type, so we want:

Auto compilation on save

Refresh our PDF reader

How I thought this would work

Initialy I thought I'd be using the amazing tool entr. entr is great because it monitors a files changes on disk. So the plan was compile with pandoc (as standard for markdown) through a shortcut in [n]vim, be watching for the file change with entr and then send a -HUP signal to my pdf reader (mupdf in this case) with pkill.

How it actually worked

Both fortunately and unfortunately there is no need for entr in this scenario. After a bit of scrolling through :help in nvim I had gathered this info:

Bash commands could be ran through the use of !

autocmd runs 'automatically when reading or writing a file' (from :h autocmd)

BufWritePost executes something 'After writing the whole buffer to a file' (again from :h autocmd)

% are the name of the file

Using *.md after BufWritePost specifies file type

From this we can start to piece together what we need to put in out .vimrc (or init.vim in my case) This is what I came up with:

autocmd BufWritePost *.md !pandoc % -o %:r.pdf --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf && pkill -HUP mupdf

Lets decompose that line:

autocmd BufWritePost - Run after ! once the entire buffer has been writen to a file

*.md - Only do this for markdown files

!pandoc % -o %:r.pdf --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf - Use pandoc to compile the current file (%) to current filename without extention (%:r.pdf) using the wkhtmltopdf PDF engine

pkill -HUP mupdf - Send mupdf a HUP signal (source)

Well that was easy

Yes and no, it took me a while to acctualy come up with that but its actually a very simple and elegant solution. If it isnt working for you make sure you have wkhtmltopdf (or whatever PDF engine you use) and mupdf installed. Also make sure you've put it in the correct file (.vimrc for vim, init.vim for nvim) and reopened any [n]vim instance to make the changes

Thank you all for reading and happy writing, ~ M

[manfromth3m0on-blog]

How to make your terminal suck less

There comes a point in any Linux user's life where they have to figure out which terminal emulator to use. Chances are if you are using a desktop environment like GNOME (default with ubuntu) or KDE you’ve stuck with the stock terminal and not given it any thought, right? But doing this leaves a lot out when it comes to having a comfortable experience on Linux.

There are may options for terminal emulators, you could choose the slick-looking Hyper.jsor the GPU accelerated alacrity maybe even the utility-focused terminator. Each of these inherently has its pros and cons but ill have to say, in my mind, there is a terminal to rule them all - st.

st, also known as suckless terminal, is a small, lightweight, and fast terminal emulator from the suckless community. Before we talk more about st, we must talk about the driving force behind suckless. The suckless philosophy is to ‘focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality. [to] keep things simple, minimal and usable‘ which means a lot for their programs, they are all fast light and efficient but on top of this, they have unrivaled modularity and customizability due to the simple, readable nature of their source code. This means that the members of the community can develop patches and changes independently of the master source code.

So why does this make st so good?

I’m glad you asked because there are a lotta things.

It can run on anything

It’s speedy as

there are no messy config files

It supports UTF-8 out of the box

clipboard support

true 256 colors

To someone who hasn’t done much research around the topic, this all seems kinda lackluster, but when you find something like even the beloved URXVT has issues with the clipboard every feature you can get is a bonus. What makes this even more impressive is this

| Emulator | Lines of code | |----------|---------------| | xterm | 65K | | urxvt | 32K | | st | <5K |

How do I get started

Now, that's easy, the steps are:

Clone the source repo

Make any config edits

Run sudo make install

1. Clone source repo

I have a GitHub repo with the patches I use applied e.g.

follow URLs by pressing alt-l

copy URLs in the same way with alt-y

Copy the output of commands with alt-o

Compatibility with Xresources and pywal for dynamic colors.

Default gruvbox colors otherwise.

Transparency/alpha, which is also adjustable from your Xresources.

zoom/change font size

copy text with alt-c, paste is alt-v or shift-insert

and lots more view it here

Download my fork with:

git clone https://github.com/manfromth3m0oN/st.git

2. Config edits

Now st does not have ‘traditional’ config files, this is because you don't just download a binary and run it, you compile st from source. So to edit the config of st enter into the cloned folder with cd st Now open config.h with your favorite text editor (I recommend nvim). All of the options are commented so I won't go over them here. There is nothing essential to change, unless you don’t use sh then you need to change the static char *shell = "/bin/sh"; line to your appropriate shell (e.g. ZSH or fish etc)

3. Compile and install

This step is probably the easiest all you have to do is install with sudo make install This works provided you have make and gcc installed if you don't just use:

sudo apt-get install make gcc OR sudo pacman -S make gcc OR install make & gcc with whatever package manager you have

Now you can start using st

Now just start the st binary however your distro or wm/de does so for i3 edit your i3/config file

# start a terminal bindsym $mod+Return exec st (or whatever *termname is in config.h)

Closing thoughts

st is not a terminal built for someone who is brand new to the Unix ecosystem, but using it from the beginning can teach you a lot about how your system runs. Use st, and all the other suckless utilities for that matter, to help further your understanding of Linux so that you can be the most efficient user you can. After all, that is what the modern Linux philosophy is.

Thank you all for reading

~ M