Pixelastic

You know that CapsLock key on your keyboard ? The sole usage of this key is to SHOUT ON TEH INTERNETS§§§. I decided to disable it completly as I never use it on purpose.

I also wanted to use it in vim to toggle between normal and insert mode with one key instead of the default i/Esc.

Disabling CapsLock

Disabling CapsLock is a fairly straightforward process. The xmodmap program is responsible for binding keyboard events to your software and you can change the default behavior by creating an ~/.Xmodmap file.

Just put the following code in it and the pressing the CapsLock key will no longer block your next keys in Caps.

clear Lock

Catching it in vim

Now, to get it in vim, you'll have a little more work to do. First, CapsLock is not one of the default vim keycodes, so you won't be able to remap it to any useful function. To use it in vim, we will hook it directly on xmodmap to another key, one that is part of vim default keycodes.

I choose the virtual F13 key. Your physical keyboard might only have F keys from 1 to 12, but the internal software seems to be able to react to 37 of them. So, why not using them ?

In your ~/.Xmodmap file, this is as easy as adding the following line

keycode 66 = F13

66 is the internal code for the CapsLock key. We just define that pressing the physical CapsLock key should trigger the F13 virtual key.

Now, in ~/.vimrc, we will tell vim to explictly listen to extended F keys (from 13 to 37) which it does not do by default.

set <F13>=^[[25~

^[[25~ is the special keyboard code sent to vim when the F13 key is triggered. Here we just define that such a keyboard code should be interpreted in vim as an <F13> vim key.

Now, you can use <F13> in your custom vim mappings

Toggling normal/insert mode in vim

vim accepts two kinds of mapping. Those triggered in normal mode (using nnoremap) and those triggered in insert mode (using inoremap).

Here we want that pressing CapsLock (or <F13> in vim as we defined) in normal mode will go to insert mode, like pressing i does. And we also want to get back to normal mode when pressing CapsLock in insert mode, just like pressing Esc does.

nnoremap <F13> i
inoremap <F13> <Esc>l

Notice the l after Esc. It is here to prevent the caret to move back one character when exiting insert mode.

Fixing the shell

One last thing to fix is your shell. By defining in xmodmap that pressing CapsLock would trigger an F13 event, it means that whatever software that react on F13 will now react on CapsLock. Unfortunatly, zsh does react on F13. It insert a ~ character on it (just like it does with F12).

To disable it, we'll simply define a key binding in ~/.zshrc so pressing F13 does nothing.

bindkey -s "\e[25~" ""

Here it is. You can now press CapsLock anywhere and it won't have any effect. Plus, pressing it in vim will toggle insert/normal mode.

Today I enjoyed the nice blue sky and moved to the park at the end of my street to finish reading the Mercurial guide.

I skipped the last chapters about patches and queues. I know this would be useful, but I'd rather get back to them when I'll need them instead of try them without any real world example.

Tweaking Mercurial

I updated my .hgrc to configure it as best as I could.

I set vimdiff to handle the conflicted merge. vim is quite hard to get (but it is coming easier the more you use it), but it seems so powerful that I'm willing to spend some time learning it.

I've also added a cm alias to commit -Am. This basically is the same as calling hg addremove; hg commit which I happen to do all the time before.

I've create two simple styles and matching templates for my new two aliases peek and hist that repectively display a peek at the last 4 commits, and display the latest 10 commits in history in a concise way. I still have to manage to find how I could add coloring to those.

I've also added a discardlocal alias to remove all local commit and get the repo back as it is on the remote repo. I never actually had to use it, but I found the code on Stack Overflow and thought I might need it later.

I finally wrote a custom resurect method. It will bring back a deleted file (obviously, the file needs to be tracked by hg). I simply find the changeset that deleted the file, and then revert the file to the parent changeset of that changeset. I might post the exact code later as I'm quite happy with the result.

A note on laptop screens

Also, I've spent the last few weeks working on my netbook when at home. This is very tiny thing, the screen is really small (compared to my two 21" at work for example). But (and I was the first surprised of it), you actually get accustomed to it after a while.

Now that I'm writing this post on my 13" other laptop, I feel like it's huge. The more I use the netbook, the more I like it. I didn't quite use it back when it was running Windows because it was way too slow. Now with Ubuntu on it, it's a whole new story !

Next week

I still have some zsh to learn. I still don't quite get the quote and double quote differences, and a few other quirks (arithmetic, arrays, etc).

I've kinda dropped the Rails tutorial. I liked it. Really, I liked it a lot. But I'm not sure I want to start again learning a framework for making websites. I've made a living doing websites for clients, I still do partly that today, and I'd like to change.

I have a lot of personnal project on my mind that I'd like to achieve. Almost all of them could be achieved using the traditional way of making websites that both cake and Rails would allow. But one of them might need another way to look at things. And for this one, I might better need node.

So.. maybe I'll start learning node next week. This is actually something I'd love to do, so this might happen. I'm currently refactoring the JS code of my work app in Backbone at the moment, so I guess there's no perfect time for some JS practice.

I made a break of the Ruby/Rails learning this week. Instead I learned a bit more about the basic Linux command, and made a few scripts to help me in my day to day work (and fun) with my Linux environment.

I currently use two laptops. One is a tiny netbook while the other a Dell XPS. I mostly use the XPS for everything work related (like posting this), while the netbook is dedicated to casual use : browsing, playing, etc.

Last week, during my vacations, I only took the netbook with me, and while not strictly speaking working on it I still had to code a little bit. I installed ScummVM, CortixTH and managed to run Carmageddon 2 under wine. I also downloaded and tried a few old emulator games on my Dingoo.

As you may have guessed, I wrote a bunch of scripts during that week to help me in some of the more tedious aspects of this task.

Dingoo deployment

Downloading roms, copying them to the Dingoo, and then testing the games to make sure they are working was tedious. I wrote a little script that automatically mount the Dingoo when plugged to the computer, and copy my games to it, removing old version along the way while still keeping my saved games.

I had to parse dmesg (thanks to grep, tail and sed) as well as use rsync for the copy.

Sansa Clip cleaning

I also wrote a simple script to clean my Sansa Clip of all the useless files I had put on it. As I only have a text screen, I don't need the jpg covers, torrent txt files, auto-generated m3u files and other thumbs.db and .DS_Store useless files.

Here, find to the rescue with some zsh scripting, and here we go.

Shared config files

As I'm working on several computers (two laptops and the one at work at least), I found myself spending time reconfiguring stuff multiple times.

Here, thanks to Dropbox and some clever ln -s calls, I managed to replicate the same config on the 3 machines easily.

From my freelance time, I also have a pretty big /etc/hosts and ~/.ssh/config file. At work, I have another one for the work servers. But I sometimes had to connect to the work server from home.

So once again, thanks to Dropbox, some ln -s once more and cat I wrote two functions to regenerate those two files based on config files. That way, whenever I change one of those files, it is updated on the other machines too.

That was it. It took most of my day.

Being able to script those little repetitive tedious task is something I really appreciate on Linux. I am no longer dependent on the UI my OS gave me, and can now really understand how things work. It requires some time to learn, but this is not going to drastically change from one version to another like it does on each Windows new release.