todomd

I’m writing todomd: terminal task manager for quick capturing of tasks into markdown files. One of main features is preservation of file formatting: it (hopefully) should keep whitespaces, blank lines, line endings, indentations, even when moving tasks between sections. My handmade markdown parser became so ridiculous that I seriously considered renaming the project to ELMM: Empty Line Management Machine. After 3 days of constant testing/fixing/refactoring of main parser, I want to just lie and cry.

But I just did a test run of todomd archive on my 6 year old, >1.5k lines of horrible, scribble-quality quicknotes.md file and in 80 ms todomd made a beautiful new archive section and didn’t break a single line. I almost cried, but this time these were the tears of joy.

AI-Generated

I’m sick of effortless AI-generated crap. Like t-shirt designs that all look exactly the same and repeat the same mistakes. Guitar that have 5-7 strings depending where on the fretboard you look? Check. Hands without thumbs? Check. Hilarious mistakes in text? Check.

Another one: plastic-looking images that replaced stock photos. I thought that stock photos were bad, but at least they were photos! Now they’re “plastic box which looks like PlayStation 5 + plastic controller which resembles Xbox pad”, or a “classroom with periodic table with elements that don’t exist”.

And don’t let me start about “AI-assisted” emotionless, one-size-fits-all prose. With forced suspense. By breaking sentences. In strangest. Places. (read with deep male voice in your head of course)

Blackened

I love Blackened by Metallica and it’s super fun to play, but holy shit, timing signatures and tempo changes in this song are crazy!

Commit Details

I noticed that in git log I’m always interested in commit date, not author date. The difference is that author date shows when author finished their work and commit date shows when it actually landed (was merged by someone else, like CI bot). Commit dates are arguably more useful because they preserve the chronology of git log. As there’s no built-in log formatting which would give me a combination of author (not committer) + commit date, I had to become a little bit creative:

# This goes e.g. to ~/.gitconfig

[pretty]
    # format:/tformat: controls spaces between commits
    commitdetails = "format:\
%C(yellow)commit %H%C(auto)%d%Creset%n\
Author:     %an <%ae>%n\
CommitDate: %cd%n%n\
%w(0,4,4)%B"

[format]
    pretty = commitdetails