From Terminator To Wezterm

2023-11-17T00:00:00+00:00
This post doesn't compare Terminator and Wezterm. This is the help I would have loved to find when starting to try Wezterm coming from Terminator.</p>
A Kind Introduction

2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00
How to leverage the Rust compiler to prevent identifier misuse ?</p>
How to go from ec2ba151-7acf-43a9-bb98-6f5331992f42</code> in your database to "Cust_ec2ba151-7acf-43a9-bb98-6f5331992f42"</code> in your REST/JSON API ?</p>
How to do it at zero runtime cost, with no boilerplate, with a derive macro ?</p>


Thinking in trees and lines, formatting Rust
2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00
I see my code projects in trees and lines, and it affects how I want it to be formatted.</p>


How to store secrets
2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00
My requirements and solution for a safe storage of personal secrets.</p>


Contributing to my FOSS projects
2023-06-02T00:00:00+00:00
As I maintain several FOSS projects, I figured it would be convenient to have in a central place some concise guidance on contributing.</p>


Manage keybindings in a Rust terminal application
2022-07-28T00:00:00+00:00
To deal with hardcoded or configurable key events in a cross-platform terminal application written in Rust, you'll probably need to</p>

determine what keybindings you can really use,</li>
use convenient hardcoded keybindings,</li>
and read keybindings from a configuration file</li>
</ul>


Adjust your application for a light or dark terminal
2022-07-16T00:00:00+00:00
So you want your unix application to select different sets of colors depending on whether the terminal is set to a light or dark theme ?</p>
Here's an how-to. It's first targeted at Rust programmers but each step can be ported to other languages.</p>


How not to learn Rust
2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00
I've seen too many good programmers struggle learning Rust, or even give up.</p>
Here are the mistakes I've seen which may make you fail at learning Rust.
I hope this list will help you avoid them.</p>


Reclaim space on disk
2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00
As my disks tend to be quite messy with time, I had to devise ways to reclaim space, which means both spotting big directories and files, and to deal with the thousands of duplicates you can't delete one per one.</p>
Here's my toolbox for cleaning my disks on linux in 3 major steps:</p>

Confirm the problem with lfs</a></li>
Spot and delete big  files and directories with broot</a></li>
Delete thousands of duplicates with backdown</a></li>
</ol>


Proper conversion from XLS to PDF in Java
2021-06-30T00:00:00+00:00
Generating or modifying Excel files in Java is easy with Apache POI</a>.</p>
But when you generate Excel reports, you always end up having to export them in PDF too.</p>
If you look for a library for this conversion, you'll find many ones, most of them expensive, and none of them giving acceptable results.</p>
I explain here the efficient and reliable enough solution I've used in a Java application.</p>


A SQL database and an interactive grapher in a single HTML file
2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00
Glassbench</a> is a Rust micro-benchmark harness. It uses a SQLite database to store bench measurements.</p>
I wanted to give it the option to open an interactive data viewer and grapher, with ability to search the history.</p>
An usual web based solution for that is to run a simple web server.</p>
But Glassbench is executed by cargo and immediately quits and I didn't want it to leave behind anything to clean, especially not daemons.
Besides, when you open a single HTML local file, it can't query additional resources, due to browser's security protections.</p>
So I decided to make it a single temporary html page opened in the user's browser.</p>


Why broot switched to Hjson for its configuration files
2020-12-22T00:00:00+00:00
TOML was originally the only format for configuring broot.</p>
Here I explain why Hjson is now the preferred one.</p>


Why TUI applications ?
2020-11-22T00:00:00+00:00
Twenty years ago, most of us thought TUI applications were going to disappear.
TUI were just a vestige of low capabilities computers.
There was no reason for TUI not to die with the rise of the personal computer.</p>
This didn't happen. We still love to use TUI applications.</p>
Why can be kind of mysterious.</p>


Broot 1.0
2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00
8 months ago, but it feels like years ago, somebody shared a link to broot on Hacker News</a>. There was some very kind messages and broot gained a few users. But I had more in my TODO list.</p>
A lot was done since.</p>
At first sight, broot</a> didn't change much:
It looks the same and what could be done then can still be done the same way, 500 commits and 60 releases later.</p>


For better prompts
2020-07-29T00:00:00+00:00
Prompts I see everywhere are very bad in my opinion.</p>
They're sometimes fancy, full of bling which amazes coworkers, but usability nightmares.</p>


Broot content search
2020-07-26T00:00:00+00:00
An example of an efficient search workflow based on broot</a>, a general purpose file manager.</p>


Use broot and meld to diff before commit
2020-07-05T00:00:00+00:00
Before every commit, I do a short review of what I wrote. And usually there's a few last things to fix, mainly comments.</p>


whoami
2020-07-04T00:00:00+00:00
Here's a short map of my main identities (the ones which are related to software making, at least):</p>

dystroy</a> is the umbrella covering all the me, and the brand of my freelance activity</li>
Canop</a> is an open-source software writer</li>
Denys Séguret</a> writes industrial software juggling with sensor data, grading steel quality, trying to make insight emerge in web interfaces</del> writes Rust for fun and profit, mainly on the backend.</li>
</ul>
You'll get news from me and my software on Mastodon (@dystroy@mastodon.dystroy.org</a>) and the best place to contact me is my Miaou chat</a> during West European day.</p>