HubbleCommand.github.io

Personal blog, project documentation, and ramblings

Tools & Tips

Posted 02 Aug 2024 , last modified 05 Apr 2025

This is going to be an ongoing list of useful tools I’ve found & use.

Sections

Upcoming

Be on the look out for JitCI !!! This is a CI platform made by JitPack, which will build your releases. Seems very promising!

As of 2025-03-27, JitCI is still in beta

Tips

MarkDown cheatsheet

SCP for file transfer

Article on Jekyll components I found after looking at the documentation. Also look at the Jekyll Cheatsheet.

Placing images in _posts causes UTF-8 read errors. Putting them in a directory that is not a collection (i.e. /assets) corrects the issue.

README best practices

  • https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme
  • https://github.com/jonatasemidio/multilanguage-readme-pattern

Databases

Neo4j is very good

Windows

Scoop is an incredibly useful command-line installer for Windows. Adds great tools like 7Zip.

  • Moving Windows: Alt + Space followed by M. This will move your mouse so that you can move a window with the top bar. Then, just move your mouse until the application comes into view. Useful if you have multiple monitors shared between devices, and need to move an application to a different screen while it is owned by another device.

  • Disabling Alt+Tab window grouping: Settings -> System -> Multitasking -> Snap windows Disable the following settings:
    • Show snap layouts when I hover over a window’s maximise button
    • Show my snapped windows when I hover oiver taskbar apps, in Task View, and when I press ALt+Tab
  • Disable Recent Files: this should not be turned on by default, but you can disable it in the File Explorer woth See More -> Options, and uncheck Show Recently Used Files as well as Show Recently Used Folders.

XML

You can import an XML file into another XML file with the entity tag. Import the file with <!ENTITY otherFile SYSTEM "otherFile.xml">, then reference it with &otherFile;:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no" ?>
<!DOCTYPE doc [ <!ENTITY otherFile SYSTEM "otherFile.xml">]>
<doc>
  <foo>
    <bar>&otherFile;</bar>
  </foo>
</doc>

Git

One majorly annoying issue is suddenly having massive diffs for seemingly no reason. The culprit is usually changes to file line endings, or file mode changes. The following commands usually fix these issues by having git ignore some of these things.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration git config --global core.autocrlf true
git config --global core.autocrlf input
git config core.filemode false
git config --global core.filemode false
git add --renormalize
git ls-files --eol
git config --global core.whitespace=fix,-indent-with-non-tab,trailing-space,cr-at-eol

https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/18225 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1967370/git-replacing-lf-with-crlf

Managing multiple accounts

While GitHub in the browser supports account switching, this feature is not available in GitHub desktop (even though a proposal exists).

However, GitHub CLI does offer account switching through profiles. But this doesn’t allow you to commit or push… so not very useful.

Ubuntu Commands

  • Copy the contents of a folder cp -a /source/. /dest/, -a is an improved recursive option, . at the end of the source path copies all files & folders, including those that are hidden
  • renaming folders is done with the mv command
  • Remove all non-hidden files with rm /path/to/dir/*
  • Remove all non-hidden files and directories with rm -r /path/to/dir/*
  • Unpacking compressed directories
    • Unzip to a specific directory with unzip /path/to/zip.zip -d /where/to/extract
    • Untar with tar -xvf tar.tar (x: extract files from archive, v: be verbose, f: specify file input, z: use gzip compression to extract the archive)
    • Untar to directory with tar -C /put/it/here -xvf tar.tar
    • REBOL files are sometimes distributed as .tar.gz files. YOu can use the above commands to uncompress it, then run it. You will most likely need to give permissions to the resulting file with chmod +x rebol/file
  • Enable or disable a site /vhost in apache2
  • Avoiding using sudo for /var/www

MSWord

To update all fields in a document (i.e. citation fields), press Ctrl + A, F9. You might need to select each table seperately.

Edge

  • When selecting groups of tabs in Firefox, closing one will close all of the selected tabs. Edge doesn’t do this, but hitting the Ctrl + W shortcut will close selected tabs in the current window.

  • Console tool utility functions and selectors

See here for more.

VSCode

You can configure it so that opening a folder will open in a new window, instead of in the current one: window.openFoldersInNewWindow: on

Some good tips from Fireship

A very good TODO extension

Turn off auto indentation (sometimes helps with git diff issues). Access preferences with File → Preferences → Settings or Ctrl + ,

// The number of spaces a tab is equal to. This setting is overridden
// based on the file contents when `editor.detectIndentation` is true.
"editor.tabSize": 4,

// Insert spaces when pressing Tab. This setting is overriden
// based on the file contents when `editor.detectIndentation` is true.
"editor.insertSpaces": true,

// When opening a file, `editor.tabSize` and `editor.insertSpaces`
// will be detected based on the file contents. Set to false to keep
// the values you've explicitly set, above.
"editor.detectIndentation": false

Regex code to delete all instances of a specific tag, including their content

\n?<description>[\S\s\n]*?<\/description>\n?

You can disable the editor scrolling past the end of a file with the setting editor.scrollBeyondLastLine : false

Auto format with Ctrl + Shift + P or with ths shortcut Shift + Alt + F.

Android Studio

Ctrl + Alt + L auto formats code

Tools

  • musikerkennung music recognition tool that I’ve had the best luck with

Taiga is a good tool for project management. It’s an open source, self-hostable, better version of Jira & GitHub issues.

Apps

Services

Text Formatters

Assets

Asset creation

AI assisted creation

This is generally good for creating placeholders

Stores

Hardware

XBee vs Bluetooth

  XBee Bluetooth
speed 250 kbps 25 Mbps
range 0.1-1.6km 10m-100m

XBee