For having been using GNOME for quite a long time, I was considering trying some tiling window managers to see what it's like a few weeks ago. Along the way, I found a nice window manager written in Python: Qtile, what interests me most is that it's a hackable window manager, which makes it flexible to extend or change its behaviors.

Well, switching to use a tiling window manager is far simpler than I thought. There are two ways to have it:

Sometimes, I need to revert a series of commits that I've already pushed, doing a git hard reset (git reset --hard) is not an option, as someone may already have new commits based on mine.

For example, assume that I've made a few commits like below:

65a2c62 * commit 10
25cad43 * commit 9
72ad583 * commit 8
ceebf9a * commit 7
acf8a11 * commit 6
28d526f * commit 5
63af1e2 * commit 4
982c71c * commit 3
0fb4c2d * commit 2
acf9da1 * commit 1
b5f9933 * commit 0

For whatever reason, I need to "drop" the changes made by commit 6 to commit 10, that is, go back to "commit 5" without deleting these commits.

There are times that I need to open many web pages of some specific websites within a browser, and there are so many tabs that I can't efficiently access one of them, as their favicons are all the same.

So I tried to find a way to rename their titles, preferably in a lightweight way, so that I can spot them quickly with my eyes.

The first thought came into my mind was to find some browser extensions to do the job. It was easy to install one with no time. But I was not very happy with the experience. It seems that it keeps the rule of renaming titles based on the URL so that the title will always be renamed if I refreshing it, which is not what I want. I'd rather want to do it in an ad-hoc way.

Recently I found some great articles on wikiHow, then I want to keep notes of them in org-mode files.

At first, I manually copied the ToC of articles, but soon I found it's tedious and takes a lot of time. Today I wrote a requests-based Python script to help me extract the ToCs (Table of Content) into org-mode outlines. It takes two arguments, the first one is the URL, the second one is the containing heading's level for the generated ToC in org-mode.

Emacs' M-x align-regex is neat when I want to align some similar text, especially when we're coding. I use its trivial version(without prefix arg) regularly on day-to-day programming work before.

For example, I can use it to align below code quickly by:

1. Choose the region
2. M-x align-regexp and type = and Enter

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa = fields[0]
bbb = fields[1]
cccccccc = fields[2]

It will be aligned to below code, now it's better to read:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa = fields[0]
bbb            = fields[1]
cccccccc       = fields[2]

A few days ago, I found myself don't understand how it works when I read the code of smart-align, A simple align-regexp wrapper for easier usage. I was confused by the parameters, especially REGEXP and GROUP, and SPACING, here is its signature:

If you ever wonder how to plot ER diagrams in plain text, you may have already heard of erd. It's a cool command line program written by Andrew Gallant in Haskell, to "compile" plain text files into nicely looking images, leveraging the power of GraphViz.

I've used erd for some time, it's cool and the syntax is quite simple. It's also quite simple to install it on Linux, just install GraphViz and erd itself, by following the instructions in the README page.

Yasnippet is a good friend to help us type less and write more, whenever we write some text snippets repeatedly. And there is also an official repository called yasnippet-snippets that contains various snippets for many programming languages (modes), so that we can have many snippets in no time by installing it.

But there is a little problem when it comes to conforming to different coding styles.

Take the if snippet for example, normally it will generate code like this: