Terminal Keyboard Shortcuts

Here are a few, just a fraction, of keyboard shortcuts which were designed to make your life less frustrating. Frustration is when you have a command of 43 letters, cursor at the end, and you want to change the third letter. Or just one path, out of the four you are using, must be changed… And here is where these shortcuts might be a help from god – who in this case is some guy who in the 80s had the same need you have now.

Ctrl+a : Go to the beginning of the line.
Ctrl+e : Go to the end of the line.
Ctrl+k : Delete all that follows.

Monitor battery consumption

Laptops, Linux, battery… omg.

As I might have mentioned, I have a cheap laptop which I want to use when I am outside, having a cafe or traveling.  Thus, I need to get as much as I can out of my battery.

My first steps were:

1. I was running kde, now I am running i3 (Note: i3 is fucking amazing…).
2. Most of my work is done, or utilizes at some point, the terminal. Thus, many terminal applications, getting to know commands etc (Note: for example, if i need a file browser for something easy then ls, cd, cat, nano work just fine. Something more elegant? I use ranger – a terminal file browser).

After these 2 first steps, something more should be done. But what? How do you maximize your battery usage? Sounds like a question, but it is not THE question – it’s the motive. The real question is: well, which process actually consumes most of the battery? Now, that is the question, and the answer is: powertop and powerstat.

Log your terminal sessions.. and replay them perhaps?

1. I do a lot of things with the terminal, and some of them i need to repeat again in the future.
2. I am really bad in documenting what I do.

Example: I had wifi issues with my laptop. I solved them by, well, installing/uninstalling drivers, kernel updates, compiling etc. Now, I would like to leave behind me the whole canonical ecosystem (running kubuntu, strictly speaking within the ubuntu ecosystem but not canonical’s? Last time i checked, canonical dropped support of kubuntu? Maybe I am wrong?). BUT, if i do that, i will still have to re-do all the things, and the whole wifi thing is a pain in the ass. If only I had something that would do the “document” side of things for me, at least to get some hints of what i did in the past.

And with these, I decided from now on to use  script. 

Countdown timer without bells but whistles

While writing the previous post, I felt the urge of.. eating. Yeah, I do that sometimes. So, I decided to cook. My problem with multitasking, when one of the tasks is cooking, is that I always fuck up the cooking. Writing the previous post was no exception: no rice for me!

So, I decided to add a countdown timer to my system.

Mutt for (G)mail

I use kubuntu on a laptop which is new, but cheap. I am satisfied with my laptop but battery is an issue. My goal was to use my 450 euros laptop for 3 or more hours, which led me to change KDE and move towards more light applications. Now, I use the i3 window manager and mainly console applications.

I will be a liar if I said that battery usage was the motivation. No. I prefer minimalism. Thus, I try to find ways to use the terminal more and more. And that led me to mutt.

Mutt is text based email client. OK, good. What do I want from it? Well, to read emails and send emails and something a bit more:  to have an experience as close to a browser as possible. It might be not clear what I mean now, but it will be later on. Why Mutt? Well, searching online made it obvious that mutt is one of the best email clients out there and, as we all know, whatever you read online *must* be true.