Archive
Start Midnight Commander with a button press
Problem
I use Midnight Commander all the time and I type “mc” at least 50x per day. Could I assign it to a key on my keyboard? And in more general: when I press a specific key on my keyboard, can I execute a custom command in my shell?
Solution
I use WezTerm as my terminal emulator and ZSH as my shell. I never use the ScrollLock key on my keyboard, so it was a perfect candidate. The idea is the following: when I press ScrollLock, a custom escape sequence will be generated by WezTerm. It functions like an event. My ZSH shell will catch this “event” and perform an action.
First, add this to your ~/.config/wezterm/wezterm.lua file:
local wezterm = require 'wezterm'
return {
keys = {
{ key = "ScrollLock", mods = "NONE", action = wezterm.action { SendString = "\x1b[ScrollLock]" } },
},
}
Then, add the following line to your ~/.zshrc file:
bindkey -s '\e[ScrollLock]' 'mc\n'
Open a new terminal and it should work.
QuickJump: bookmark your directories and switch between them easily
I made a little project that facilitates jumping between directories in the command line. You can find it here: https://github.com/jabbalaci/quickjump . Visit the GitHub page for more info.
Demo
[shell] How to tell your distro version?
Problem
I use two different Linux distros, Ubuntu and Manjaro. Both of them are great. My shell resource files (previously .bashrc, now .zshrc) are shared via Dropbox. However, sometimes I would like to differentiate my Ubuntu and Manjaro settings, within the same resource file. How to do that?
Solution
Here is what I use:
# DESKTOP_SESSION is "ubuntu" (for Ubuntu) or "xfce" (for Manjaro) if [[ "$DESKTOP_SESSION" == "ubuntu" ]]; then alias files='dpkg-query -L' else alias files='pacman -Ql' fi
Older solution
Before finding the environment variable DESKTOP_SESSION, I used this:
# return "ubuntu", "manjaro" (without quotes)
get_distro_name() {
cat /etc/os-release | grep "^ID=" | cut -d= -f2
}
# usage:
# if [[ $(get_distro_name) == "ubuntu" ]]; then
# alias files='dpkg-query -L' # ubuntu
# else
# alias files='pacman -Ql' # manjaro
# fi
The Ubuntu Incident