I have an application that uses GLib's commandline option parser to handle commandline arguments (as described here).
What I've found is that the description for each option entry has to be very short - in order to fit within the width of a terminal of standard size (when the application is called with the --help argument). If a description for an option is too long it wraps around, and this looks pretty bad. Is there an accepted way to tidy this up?
For example, here's what part of the help output from my application looks like in an 80 character wide terminal window:
Application Options:
-i, --ip-addr Sets the IP address to which the video strea
ms will be sent. If this option is not used then the default IP address of 127.0
.0.1 is used.
-p, --port Sets the port to send the video streams to.
If not chosen this defaults to 1234.
Ideally it would look something like this:
Application Options:
-i, --ip-addr Sets the IP address to which the video
streams will be sent. If this option is not
used then the default IP address of
127.0.0.1 is used.
-p, --port Sets the port to send the video streams to.
If not chosen this defaults to 1234.
I could just get the above result manually, by working out the required length of each line of my option descriptions. Then I could manually enter newlines and spaces into the strings to get the right indentation. But this seems like a really rough approach, and I'm sure there must be a better and less time-consuming way of formatting the output.
I'm sure this problem must have come up before for others, but I haven't found a solution, does anybody here know of a better way to get nicer formatting?
I have the exact same issue. At present I am using the ghetto fix of adding spaces. This however is not possible with the argument description (rather than just the description, which is what is printed at the end). If you add newlines to break the argument description the spacing of the proceeding arguments is messed up.
Related
Context
So I finally give a try to Fish, and as one would expect I encounter some frictions due to differences with my usual routines.
The most astonishing for me, as for many other, was the absence of the bang operator. I'm fine with the lose of sudo !!, as the suggested function replacement seems even better to me, I named it gar which means "To make, compel (someone to do something); to cause (something to be done." However I'll need a replacement for !<abc><enter> which grab the last history line starting with <abc> and run it without further ado, suggestions are welcome.
Now, for the more personal things:
- I use a Typematrix 2030 keyboard
- I use a bépo layout
- I like to configure default finger position keys with the most used actions
Aims
As on my keybord <enter> is well positioned and is semantically relevant for that, ideally I would like to achieve the following key binding:
ctrl-enter: accept the whole suggestion and run it without further confirmation
ctrl-tab: accept the whole suggestion and wait for further edit
alt-enter: redo the last command without further confirmation
But according to xev it appears that, at least with Gnome-terminal, this combinations are not recognized. Are they terminal that supports it? For now I remapped these three to <ctrl>-i, <alt>-i and <alt>-I respectively:
bind --preset \ci forward-char execute
bind --preset \ei forward-char
bind --preset \eI forward-word
This works as expected, but it seems that now the tab key will also map to the first item. I guess that tab map to <alt>-i at some point in the shell stack. I wasn't aware of that, so I don't know yet if it will be possible for Fish to separate each of them.
To manage jobs, I also came with
bind --preset \es fg
bind --preset \eS bg
The first works as expected, but the second one doesn't. With application like vim, the binding should be operated in the application configuration itself of course. But for things as trivial as yes, <alt>-S won't work as expected while <crl>-z continue to operate normally.
I also would like to bind some commands like ls -alh and git status --short to a directly executed command, showing the result bellow the currently edited line, allowing to further type seamlessly, but didn't find the way to do it yet.
Summary of remaining question
So here are my more precise questions summarised:
how do I bind the sleep signal to <alt>-S?
is there a terminal I can use where <alt>-<enter> and <ctrl>-<enter> works?
how to seamlessly run command while maintaining the current line edition in place?
can you bind something to <alt>-i without altering <tab>?
how do I bind the sleep signal to -S?
What you are doing with bind \es fg is to alter a binding inside the shell.
But when you execute yes, the shell isn't currently in the foreground, so shell bindings don't apply.
What you'd have to do instead is change the terminal settings via stty susp \cs,
but fish resets the terminal settings when executing commands (so you can't accidentally break them and end up in an unusable environment), so there currently is no way to do this in fish.
can you bind something to <alt>-i without altering <tab>?
Sure. You bind \ei. Which is escape+i, which is alt-i (because in a terminal alt is escape).
Your problem is with ctrl-i, which in the way terminals encode control+character is tab. The application receives an actual tab character, and at that point the information has been lost.
is there a terminal I can use where - and - works?
Most terminals should send \e\r for alt-enter. ctrl-enter again is unencodable with the usual code (because \r is ctrl-m), just like ctrl-tab is.
Any fix to this requires the terminal to encode these combination differently.
how to seamlessly run command while maintaining the current line edition in place?
I don't know what you mean by this. I'm guessing you want fish to remain open and editable while a command also runs in the foreground. That can't work. There's no way to synchronize output from two commands to a terminal, not with cursor movement being what it is.
I am using Sublime Text 3 and am trying to access the command palette using ctrl-shift-P. This shortcut is not working. I am running Ubuntu 16.04. Any help to fix this would be greatly appreciated.
The two main reasons for this sort of situation (regardless of the key sequence in question) are:
A user installed plugin or custom key binding is bound to the same key, which is taking precedence and stopping the action that you expect from happening
Some external process is eating the keystroke before Sublime even gets to see it.
In order to diagnose which it might be, you can open the Sublime console with View > Show Console or by pressing Ctrl+`, then enter the following commands:
sublime.log_commands(True)
sublime.log_input(True)
Once you've done that, press the key sequence in question and check the output in the console. In your specific case, you should see this:
key evt: shift+control+p
command: show_overlay {"overlay": "command_palette"}
Not seeing the command that you expect indicates that some other action is bound to the key in question, and usually the command will lead you to what's causing the problem.
Not seeing the key event means that some external process is eating the key. This could be some global program or it could be something in the OS doing it (in the case of Linux, the window manager).
It's also possible that you see a different key event entirely, which indicates that your keyboard layout is not what Sublime expects.
Depending on the situation you may be able to disable whatever is eating the key. Presuming you can't find what that is or otherwise don't want to disable it, or if the event shows that Sublime is seeing a different key, the solution is to change the key binding.
The procedure for this is to find the binding that's not working and copy it to your custom key bindings, changing the key as appropriate to something that Sublime can see.
For core Sublime key bindings, look in Preferences > Key Bindings to find the key in question. For packages, that's generally in Preferences > Package Settings > PACKAGENAME > Key Bindings.
In your case, the setting is a default key binding, so looking in the default key bindings yields the following binding, which you can put in your custom key bindings and change as needed:
{
"keys": ["ctrl+shift+p"],
"command": "show_overlay",
"args": {"overlay": "command_palette"}
},
Something that I found:
Weirdly my Sublime Text 3 doesn't recognise the command if I use LCTRL abd LSHIFT. Using RCTRL+RSHIFT+p opens the command palette, so try that.
In my case it was an app called https://noiz.io which had stolen this shortcut. It can take a bit of time as there isn't (AFAIK) a way to find the application which is bound to a shortcut.
In my case a Pomodoro app I just installed had a command for starting clock defined with the same shortcut and it was stealing the event from Sublime. Just removed the shortcut assignment and it works now.
I am using the techinque shown here and in a number of other places to cause my application to launch at start-up in place of Explorer (and Metro in Windows 8!) by creating a registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
with c:\xxxxx\MyApp.exe as the argument.
This works fine but I also need to pass it some arguments. I've tried this by making my key value (for example) "c:\xxxx\MyApp.exe" "arg1, arg2" but it would appear that arguments are being taken as a possible second start-up program with the comma as a delimiter. Can anyone advise how to pass arguments to a shell substitute? I've also tried double quotes with the same effect. Is it actually possible to pass arguments in this way? Or must I create some kind of launcher app to do this indirectly? I really do want my app to be the only kid on the block....
BTW I'm using Windows 8.0 and my app is written in Delphi.
AFAIK, you'd use the parameters just like you would in a batch file:
"C:\xxxxx\MyApp.exe" "%1" "%2" "%3" "%4" "%5"
In a batch (or the registry) the "%x" parameters have special meaning. They always mean "parameter X".
I'm using the iPhone library for MeCab found at https://github.com/FLCLjp/iPhone-libmecab . I'm having some trouble getting it to tokenize all possible words. Specifically, I cannot tokenize "吉本興業" into two pieces "吉本" and "興業". Are there any options that I could use to fix this? The iPhone library does not expose anything, but it uses C++ underneath the objective-c wrapper. I assume there must be some sort of setting I could change to give more fine-grained control, but I have no idea where to start.
By the way, if anyone wants to tag this 'mecab' that would probably be appropriate. I'm not allowed to create new tags yet.
UPDATE: The iOS library is calling mecab_sparse_tonode2() defined in libmecab.cpp. If anyone could point me to some English documentation on that file it might be enough.
There is nothing iOS-specific in this. The dictionary you are using with mecab (probably ipadic) contains an entry for the company name 吉本興業. Although both parts of the name are listed as separate nouns as well, mecab has a strong preference to tag the compound name as one word.
Mecab lacks a feature that allows the user to choose whether or not compounds should be split into parts. Note that such a feature is generally hard to implement because not everyone agrees on which compounds can be split and which ones can't. E.g. is 容疑者 a compound made up of 容疑 and 者? From a purely morphological point of view perhaps yes, but for most practical applications probably no.
If you have a list of compounds you'd like to get segmented, a quick fix is to create a user dictionary for the parts they consist of, and make mecab use this in addition to the main dictionary.
There is Japanese documentation on how to do this here. For your particular example, it would involve the steps below.
Make a user dictionary with two entries, one for 吉本 and one for 興業:
吉本,,,100,名詞,固有名詞,人名,名,*,*,よしもと,ヨシモト,ヨシモト
興業,,,100,名詞,一般,*,*,*,*,こうぎょう,コウギョウ,コウギョウ
I suspect that both entries exist in the default dictionary already, but by adding them to a user dictionary and specifying a relatively low specificness indicator (I've used 100 for both -- the lower, the more likely to be split), you can get mecab to tend to prefer the parts over the whole.
Compile the user dictionary:
$> $MECAB/libexec/mecab/mecab-dict-index -d /usr/lib64/mecab/dic/ipadic -u mydic.dic -f utf-8 -t utf-8 ./mydic
You may have to adjust the command. The above assumes:
Mecab was installed from source in $MECAB. If you use mecab installed by a package manager, you might have difficulties finding the mecab-dict-index tool. Best install from source.
The default dictionary is in /usr/lib64/mecab/dict/ipadic. This is not part of the mecab package; it comes as a separate package (e.g. this) and you may have difficulties finding this, too.
mydic is the name of the user dictionary created in step 1. mydic.dic is the name of the compiled dictionary you'll get as output (needs not exist).
Both the system dictionary (-t option) and the user dictionary (-f option) are encoded in UTF-8. This may be wrong, in which case you'll get an error message later when you use mecab.
Modify the mecab configuration. In a system-wide installation, this is a file named /usr/lib64/mecab/dic/ipadic/dicrc or similar. In your case it may be located somewhere else. Add the following line to the end of the configuration file:
userdic = home/myhome/mydic.dic
Make sure the absolute path to the dictionary compiled above is correct.
If you then run mecab against your input, it will split the compound into its parts (I tested it, using mecab 0.994 on a Linux system).
A more thorough fix would be to get the source of the default dictionary and manually remove all compoun nouns you want to get split, then recompile the dictionary. As a general remark, using a CJK tokenizer for a serious application in production mode over a longer period of time usually involves a certain amount of dictionary maintenance (adding/removing entries) regularly.
I just caught myself doing something I do a lot, and wanted to generalize it, express it, share it and see who else is following this general practice, to find some other example situations where it might be relevant.
The general practice is getting something wrong first, on purpose, to establish that everything else is right before undertaking the current task.
What I was trying to do, specifically, was to find examples in our code base where the dojo TextArea widget was used. I knew (because I had it in front of me - existence proof) that the TextBox widget was present in at least one file. So I looked first for what I knew was there:
grep -r digit.form.TextBox | grep -v
svn
This wasn't right - I had made a common (for me) mistake of leaving off the star, so I fixed that:
grep -r digit.form.TextBox * | grep
-v svn
which found no results! Quick comparison with the file I was looking at showed me I had misspelled "dijit":
grep -r dijit.form.TextBox * | grep
-v svn
And now I got results. Cool; doing it wrong first on purpose meant my query was correct except for looking for the wrong thing, so now I could construct the right query:
grep -r dijit.form.TextArea * | grep
-v svn
and be confident that when it gave me no results, it was because there are no such files, and not because I had malformed the query.
I'll add three other examples as answers; please add any others you're aware of.
TDD
The red-green-refactor cycle of test-driven development may be the archetype of this practice. With red, demonstrate that the functionality doesn't exist; then make it exist and demonstrate that you've done so by witnessing the green bar.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275085
This VBA routine turns off the "subdatasheets" property for every table in your MS Access database. The user is instructed to make sure error-handling is set to "Break only on unhandled errors." The routine identifies tables needing the fix by the error that is thrown. I'm not sure this precisely fits your question, but it's always interesting to me that the error is being used in a non-error way.
Here's an example from VBA:
I also use camel case when I Dim my variables. ThisIsAnExampleOfCamelCase. As soon as I exit the VBA code line if Access doesn't change the lower case variable to camel case then I know I've got a typo. [OR, Option Explicit isn't set, which is the post topic.]
I also use this trick, several times an hour at least.
arrange - assert - act - assert
I sometimes like, in my tests, to add a counter-assertion before the action to show that the action is actually responsible for producing the desired outcome demonstrated by the concluding assertion.
When in doubt of my spelling, and of my editor's spell-checking
We use many editors. Many of them highlight misspelled words as I type them - some do not. I rely on automatic spell checking, but I can't always remember whether the editor of the moment has that feature. So I'll enter, say, "circuitx" and hit space. If it highlights, I'll back up over the space and the "x" and type another space - and learn that I spelled circuit correctly - but if it doesn't, I'll copy the word and paste it into a known spell-checker to see whether I did.
I'm not sure it's the best way to act, as it does not prevent you from mispelling the final command, for example typing "TestArea" or something like that instead of "TextArea" (your finger just have to slip a little for such a mistake).
IMHO the best way is to run your "final" command, but on two sample files first : one containing the requested text, another that doesn't.
In other words, instead of running a "similar" command, run the real one, but over "similar" data.
(Not sure if this would be a good idea to try for real!)
For example, you might give the system to the users for testing and tell them the password to get started is "Apple".
You know the users are fully up and ready to test (everything is installed and connections to databases working) when they contact you and say the password doesn't work (it's actually "Orange").