TIL: Today I learned...

Today I learned that Vim has some special marks which it sets automatically: Command Description `. jump to position where last change occurred in current buffer `" jump to position where last exited current buffer `0 jump to position in last file edited (when exited Vim) `1 like `0 but the previous file (also `2 etc) '' jump back (to line in current buffer where jumped from) `` jump back (to position in current buffer where jumped from) '[ or '] jump to beginning/end of previously changed or yanked text '< or '> jump to beginning/end of last visual selection The funny thing is VsVim displays these in the gutter by default and I never knew what the symbols meant. Vscode-vim has an option to display marks in the gutter but only the regular marks and not these.

Today I learned that you can use the --patch parameter with several git commands. The --patch parameter is probably most known for interactively staging changes from the cli, but I’ve never really used it because I find GUI clients are much more convenient for this. But apparently you can also use it with restore/checkout to grab specific changes from another branch. git restore --source=branch-name --patch This is something I haven’t seen easily done in any git client. ...

Today I learned that git has a $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file can contain additional patterns of files to ignore but isn’t committed to the repository. For me this is handy for some tooling configuration files that I use personally but don’t want to clutter the main .gitignore of the repo. If there are some files that you want to always ignore, then you can specify a global ignore file in your git config with core.excludesFile. ...

Today I learned about raw string literals introduced in C# 11. The big improvement to me is that you don’t need to escape double quotes. So no more of this noise if you need a json string: string json = @" { ""number"": 42, ""text"": ""Hello, world"", ""nested"": { ""flag"": true } }"; You can now write: string json = """ { "number": 42, "text": "Hello, world", "nested": { "flag": true } } """; The other nice feature is that an extraneous indentation will stripped out based on the location of the closing """. 🔥 ...

Today I learned that you can actually specify different hash algorithms for Subresource Integrity (SRI) hashes. If you aren’t familiar with SRI, this post does a good job explaining why it’s useful and how it would have mitigated the recent pollyfill.io incident. I needed to add the hashes to some scripts from a third party CDN that didn’t provide them and I came across this handy generator which let’s you choose which algorithm to use and defaults to SHA-384 and report-uri has a generator that just includes all 3 different hashes in the integrity value. ...

Today I learned that javascript has a handy built-in function called URLSearchParams() that you can use to build a url query string from an object. const petfinderData = { key: "12345", shelterID: "abc00", count: 20, animals: ["dogs", "cats"], }; const query = new URLSearchParams(petfinderData); // returns "key=12345&shelterID=abc00&count=20&animals=dogs%2Ccats" const queryString = query.toString(); Read more: https://gomakethings.com/how-to-build-a-query-string-from-an-object-of-data-with-vanilla-js/ You’ll want to be careful with complex object list arrays since it serializes to a form like animals=dogs,cats, which not be the format the server expects. Asp.net model-binding for instance, by default expects a format like animals=dogs&animals=cats (and some other variations).

I discovered that a reword option was added to --fixup back in git 2.32 The basic command looks like git commit --fixup=reword:<commit> and you can use it like you would the other autosquash commands. I recommend creating an alias for it though. Thanks to this post, I’ve had a fixup alias that uses fzf to select form recent commits so I created a similar one for reword: [alias] reword = "!git log -n 50 --pretty=format:'%h %s' --no-merges | fzf | cut -c -7 | xargs -o -I{} git commit --fixup=reword:{}" Note, if you’re on Windows, you can install fzf via Chocolatey. And you might also be interested in PSFzf which a Powershell module that wraps fzf.

Today I learned how you can view the Modelstate errors while debugging a controller in Asp.Net: ModelState.Where(x => x.Value.Errors.Count > 0).Select(x => x.Key).ToList() Just paste that in the watch window. If you’ve tried debugging to find what field is causing the Modelstate to be invalid, you’ll know how tedious it is to dig through but thanks to this post for this handy tip!

Today I learned about the new view transitions API and I was pretty impressed with how much of the heavy lifting the browser will now do for you to animate between states. Adam Argyle has a fun talk where he shows what you can do with this new API. I only had to add a couple of lines of javascript to animate reordering a list of items that would have required a more complicated technique like FLIP (first last invert play) in the past.

You probably don’t want to put a React error boundary at the root of a component (meaning, wrapping the component’s own render output). This is because error boundaries only catch errors in their child component tree. They won’t catch errors that occur within the error boundary component itself, including errors in its own render method or lifecycle methods. To use an error boundary effectively, you need to wrap the component you want to protect with the error boundary from the parent. ...