Comment by latexr

I am not the author, but my bet is that he didn't know of its existence.

The best part about sharing your config or knowledge is that someone will always light up your blind spots.

Python also pretty-prints out of the box:

    $ echo '{ "hello": "world" }' | python3 -m json.tool
    {
        "hello": "world"
    }

Other examples where native features are better than these self-made scripts...

> vim [...] I select a region and then run :'<,'>!markdownquote

Just select the first column with ctrl-v, then "i> " then escape. That's 4 keys after the selection, instead of 20.

> u+ 2025 returns ñ, LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE

`unicode` is widely available, has a good default search, and many options. BTW, I wonder why "2025" matched "ñ".

     unicode ñ
    U+00F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE
    UTF-8: c3 b1 UTF-16BE: 00f1 Decimal: ñ Octal: \0361

> catbin foo is basically cat "$(which foo)"

Since the author is using zsh, `cat =foo` is shorter and more powerful. It's also much less error-prone with long commands, since zsh can smartly complete after =.

I use it often, e.g. `file =firefox` or `vim =myscript.sh`.

Shoutout to rip as an alternative to rm and trash:

https://github.com/nivekuil/rip

> Why prioritise node instead of jq?

In powershell I just do

    > echo '{"foo": "bar"} | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json
    {
        "foo": "bar"
    }

But as a function

`trash` is good to know, thanks! I'd been doing: "tell app \"Finder\" to move {%s} to trash" where %s is a comma separated list of "the POSIX file <path-to-file>".

For trash on macOS, I recommend https://github.com/ali-rantakari/trash

Does all the right things and works great.

There’s a similar tool that works well on Linux/BSDs that I’ve used for years, but I don’t have my FreeBSD desktop handy to check.

> Why prioritise node instead of jq? The latter is considerably less code and even comes preinstalled with macOS, now.

That was my thought. I use jq to pretty print json.

What I have found useful is j2p and p2j to convert to/from python dict format to json format (and pretty print the output). I also have j2p_clip and p2j_clip, which read from and then write to the system clipboard so I don't have to manually pipe in and out.

> Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

I also made a uuid, which just runs uuidgen, but then trims the \n. (And maybe copied to clipboard? It was at my old job, and I don't seem to have saved it to my personal computer.)

Instead of trash, reimplementing rm (to only really delete after some time or depending on resource usage or to shred of you are paranoid if the goal is to really delete something) or using zfs makes much more sense.

I believe it would be possible to execute an applescript to tell the finder to delete the files in one go. It would theoretically be possible to construct/run the applescript directly in a shell script. It would be easier (but still not trivial) to write an applescript file to take the file list as an argument to then delete when calling from the shell.

Trash command first appeared in macOS 14.0, which was 2023.

On Linux you also have

    % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid
    464a4e91-5ce4-47b6-bb09-8a60fde572fb

I do `mv a.txt /tmp` instead of `rm`.

and it's `New-Guid` in PowerShell.