This is something I've being meaning to do for a couple or so years now, and unsurprisingly it's bubbled up again recently: the business of swapping the name of the master branch in git out for something better.

Because it's one of those jobs that's simultaneously simple and also laborious, I kept putting it off. Changing up the local configuration so that main (or whatever name you prefer) is used "out of the box" is simple enough; the laborious part is updating all of the repositories that live in the "forge of choice". In my case, over on GitHub, I have getting on for 200 repositories -- 142 of which are public (as of the time of writing). At work we use GitLab as our internal forge and I've got a non-trivial number of repositories on there too.

The obvious first step to tackling this is to knock up a little tool to help find the repos that still need swapping. That was simple enough:

#!/bin/bash

# Quick and dirty tool to find repositories that still make use of a
# "master" branch. Helps with tracking down the ones that need
# updating/improving.

for repo in $(find . -name .git)
do
    (
        cd "$(dirname $repo)"

        if git branch | grep master > /dev/null 2>&1
        then
            echo "$(dirname $repo)"
        fi
    )
done

### git-archaic ends here

It's not meant to be clever, just something I can run when I'm in a "default branch swapping" mood so find a repository or two to tackle. The idea being that it uses find to pull out any instance of .git in or below the current directory, changes to it (inside a sub-process to ensure the PWD gets put back after the cd that happens, before the next iteration of the loop), gets a list of the branches and, if master is one of them, prints the directory name.

Using this, I can now slowly work through my more active repositories and make the swap -- the idea being that if I currently have them cloned down to my machine, they're obviously some level of "active". At some point I imagine I could get more clever and use the APIs of the forges to look at all the repositories I own; that's another job for another day.

This gives me enough to be going on with. :-)

It's five years ago this month that I bought myself my first macOS (then OS X) device. After many years of having a Windows machine as my daily driver, which was also my work machine (I worked from home), I decided it was high time that I returned to having a Unix-a-like system on my desk too. For a decade or so, starting in the later-90s, I'd had a GNU/Linux desktop. I still had a Windows desktop (until a couple of years ago most of my work was on DOS and Windows), but thanks to the wonders of a KVM, and later an X server that ran on Windows, my personal hacking was done on a GNU/Linux desktop.

But as things moved around, priorities changed, as life moved on, the GNU/Linux boxes got retired and never quite replaced. Eventually, in 2015, I found myself with the means and desire to recover that sort of setup. Long story short, after a lot of reading up and weighing up options I decided that the best option for a desktop Unix was... an iMac!

I loved it. Sure, there were lots of little things on the surface that were different or annoying or just plain not as cool as the Mac fans would tell you, but under the hood I found what I needed: a Unix CLI with all the things I knew well. And, of course, it ran GNU Emacs just fine; that was the really important thing for me.

Pretty much right away I decided that it might be fun to learn the tools necessary to develop native Mac apps, and perhaps even iOS apps. I downloaded XCode, bought a book, and started working through it. Having got that book, I decided it might be interesting to own an iOS device too. So, sort of needing an MP3 player, and having no wish to get an iPhone, I got myself an iPod Touch. So I was all set to devour the Swift book, write some stuff for OS X, create an iOS app or two, and... life happened. Stuff cropped up that distracted me from taking that further and I never really returned to working through the book.

Fast forward to now and that initial iMac and iPod purchase spiralled a wee bit. Next after the iPod was an iPad Mini, when my Nexus 7 was starting to show its age and it was obvious that Google wasn't going to produce any more good Android tablets. Then, when I needed a very portable Unix-a-like machine for trips between where I was living and Edinburgh, I got myself a MacBook Air. Since then the iPod Touch has been replaced once, as has the iPad Mini. I now also own an iPad and a MacBook Pro. Unless Apple screw up and turn Macs into something unusable for developers (there are rumours), I imagine I'll be using Apple devices for some time to come now.

And then, last month, having finally got frustrated with where Google were going with Android and the Pixel series, I jumped ship to the iPhone 11.

As of right now I'm in a situation where I'm all about the Apple ecosystem regarding hardware and operating systems (including for my work machine), all of which is there to support my heavy use of the Google ecosystem (actually, the one bit of Google hardware I still lean on heavily is the Google Home -- I have 3 around my home).

So... given all of that, I thought it was time to look at returning to learning Swift, with a view to writing some native macOS and i(Pad)OS stuff. I soon realised that the book I'd bought back in 2015 was rather out of date. It covers Swift 1.2 -- we're now up to 5.2! Given this, and given I've forgotten pretty much everything I'd read at the time, I decided I should start again from scratch.

This weekend I've started reading my way though iOS Programming Fundamentals with Swift. While this obviously has an emphasis on iOS, I'm already finding that the first part of the book is a really great introduction to the Swift language in general. The pace seems just right, and the way topics are grouped makes it easy enough for me to skip over what's obvious (I don't need to know what objected-oriented programming is, and what the difference between a class and an object is, etc) and read up on the detail of this particular language when it comes to general concepts I know (knowing the differences between a class, struct and enum in the language is important, for example).

I've yet to write a line of code, but I'm fine with that. The book is spending a lot of time introducing the language before encouraging you to fire up XCode, and I'm okay with that. I'm never a fan of being asked to write out code that I can't properly follow -- that just makes stuff look like magic when it's far more educational to know what's going on. What I am finding is I'm making lots of notes that are either "oh, yeah, this is cool, I like this idea!" or "WTF are you kidding me?!?". Which is really nice -- it's always great to learn a new language that's a bit different from what you normally use.

My plan then, over the next few weeks, it to keep at this and hopefully document my journey. I think I'd like to write a short series of TIL-type posts; nothing too long, just some new thing I read or discovered and my reaction to it. So, if you happen to follow this blog, I apologise in advance for any Swift-spam.

You have been warned. ;-)

It's no surprise that I spend a lot of time in Emacs. Especially when I'm developing software, either for work or for personal fun, most of my time is time spent in Emacs. While I do obviously flit over to Chrome, and mostly do my CLI stuff in iTerm2 (I really like eshell but it just can't replace a good terminal for me), I spend a lot of time looking at Emacs.

Here's what my Emacs looks like:

Key elements for me are as follows:

Light background

Something I've never really got on with when it comes to code editing is dark themes and dark backgrounds. I find it too much of an eye strain. Oddly, I tend to prefer dark themes everywhere else, but not when it comes to working in Emacs. The theme I use is the built-in adwaita theme.

Less boring mode line

I make use of powerline to make the mode line a bit less boring-looking. While the colour scheme is such that it's kept in line with the light look, the style is nice in that it sort of matches the style of prompt I use in my shell.

Full screen

I always run Emacs as a full-screen application, then splitting it into different tiled windows using its own internal window handling. This is something I've done from way back when I got started with my first GNU/Linux desktop machine, and still like to do on macOS.

I also run Emacs as a server and then use a little wrapper around emacsclient to open files (both locally and remotely) from the command line in that Emacs session.

Comfortable eshell when I need it

Although I say above that I generally don't use eshell, preferring to use a full-featured terminal application, in combination with fish, I do sometimes dip into eshell for quick things. So of course I have that configured to feel comfortable too.

I do this easily thanks to eshell-git-prompt.

By coincidence, in a couple of different places over the last couple of weeks, the subject of "how do I progress in leaning to program?" has cropped up. For me, I think the approaches and solutions tend to be the same for when I want to get my head around a new language: read good examples of idiomatic code, read other related materials, find a problem you care about and implement a solution (ideally something you'll directly benefit from, or at least others may benefit from). Hence the 5x5 puzzle and Norton Guide reader projects I mentioned in my previous post.

Of course, not everyone has problems that they need solving in a way that would work for this approach. So another approach I've recommended in the past is to go looking on somewhere like GitHub and find projects that promote "low-hanging fruit" issues in a way that's designed to be friendly for those who are new to development, new to contributing or new to the problem domain.

While looking for examples of this yesterday I stumbled on Awesome for Beginners. This looks like a great list and one I'm going to keep bookmarked for future reference. Now, this particular list does seem to have an emphasis on pulling in people who are new to contributing to a project rather than new to development, but it does strike me as a good place to start looking no matter where you're coming from.

I know I'm going to start having a wander around that list. It's always nice to contribute and I feel there's real personal benefit in actively solving a problem that someone else has and welcomes help with.

These days fish is my shell of choice. I started out with bash back in the 1990s, went through a bit of a zsh/oh-my-zsh phase, but earlier this year finally settled on fish.

At some point I might write a post about my fish config, and why fish works well for me. But that's an idea for another time.

In this post I thought I'd share a little snippet of code that can come in handy now and again.

Sometimes I find myself inside a git repo, in the shell, and I want to get to the "forge" for that repo. This is most often either on GitHub, or in a company-local installation of GitLab. To get there quickly I wrote gh.fish:

##############################################################################
# Attempt go visit the origin hub for the current repo.

function gh -d "Visit the repo in its origin hub"

    # Check that there is some sort of origin.
    set origin (git config --get remote.origin.url)

    # If we didn't get anything...
    if not test "$origin"
        # ...complain and exit.
        echo "This doesn't appear to be a git repo with an origin"
        return 1
    end

    # Open in the browser.
    open "https://"(string replace ":" "/" (string replace -r '\.git$' "" (string split "@" $origin)[ 2 ]))

end

### gh.fish ends here

The idea is pretty simple: I see if the repo has an origin of some description and, if it has, I slice and dice it into something that looks like the URL you'd expect to find for a GitHub or GitLab repo. Finally I use open to open the URL in the environment's browser of choice.

Like many programmers, I have a couple of "Hello, World" projects that I've carried with me over the years. One is 5x5 (which has been used to get to grips with things as diverse as the Palm Pilot and GNU emacs). Another is Norton Guides database readers.

I've made Norton Guides tools that have allowed web servers to serve guides (w3ng), that have allowed you to convert guides to HTML (ng2html), that have let you read guides on OS/2 and GNU/Linux (eg) and also have let you read guides in Microsoft Windows (weg). It's a problem I know fairly well and one where I know the solution well enough so I can concentrate on learning the new language or environment.

Recently I wanted to get to grips with some "pure" ES6 coding while also getting to know node.js. A new version of the Norton Guide code, written for this environment, seemed like a good thing to do.

And so jsNG was born.

At its core is a library of code for opening and reading data from Norton Guides databases. While I doubt it's good ES6 code, or even good node.js code, it's been very useful in giving me a fun problem to solve and it'll carry on being something I'll tweak and tinker with by way of trying new things out.

On top of this I've built a handful of tools for working with Norton Guides databases. The most useful one at the moment (the others are more in the "test the library" than the "make something handy with the library" category) is ngserve. This is designed as a simple Norton Guides database HTTP server.

When run, you give it a list of guides to serve:

and it does the right thing. It has a small number of command line options that help configure what it does:

Possibly the most useful are the ones that let you change how it handles "higher" DOS characters and, if you don't like the default colours and stuff, the option that lets you point to your own style sheet (note for now you'll need to host the stylesheet somewhere else -- ngserve won't serve it for you; I'm aiming to change that in some way in the near future).

jsNG does have a fairly basic design compromise at its heart. In the very early version I started out using the async functions for opening and reading the guides. This got very tedious very quickly and I could see that it was going to make for a very messy library with a very messy interface. While it might not be in the spirit of node.js programming I decided to go with the sync version of the file IO functions and code up the core library based around this.

This approach also means that I took another leap that I never have done with Norton Guides before: rather than doing the traditional thing of keeping an open handle into them and reading direct from the file as you navigate the guide, I simply read it all into a buffer in one go and keep it in memory. This is a "guides are small, memory is cheap, things will go faster" approach.

It does mean that when you load up a load of guides into ngserve they're all sat in memory. The upside of this is that things should be a lot faster and the code is a lot easier to follow (I think). To put this in some perspective: I have a directory here that contains 110 Norton Guides files. They total 36M in size. If that seems like a lot of stuff to hold in memory... remind me how much is being used by your web browser so you can look at some hilarious kittens. ;)

Anyway, that's where I'm at with it right now. The code is mostly settled and mostly tidy. I need to write up some documentation for it (and so I need to take a look at good JavaScript documentation tools) and perhaps tinker with ngserve a little more. I'd also like to do a new version of ng2html with this -- a version that makes it far easier to control the style of the output. I'm also tempted to do a CLI-based reader in pure ES6; something similar to EG or WEG.

All in good time.