Cli on Chris Irwin

Alt Tab With Ptyxis

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:36:19 -0400

GNOME has a wonderful feature of grouping applications in the Alt+Tab menu. Pressing Alt+Tab lets you quickly switch from Terminal to Firefox, without having to iterate through each of your multiple Terminal or Firefox windows.

The issue is that not all Terminal windows are equal. Perhaps you’ve got specific dev tools you want separated from other Terminals. In my case, I use mutt for email, and I want to be able to quickly Alt+Tab to my email without having to sift through a half-dozen terminals I’m using for other things.

Offlineimap repeatedly deleting All Mail

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:58:00 +0000

or “That’s why you read changelogs”

I was having some significant difficulties with offlineimap after upgrading to 6.5.4 (I’m using Ubuntu currently, so I upgraded straight from 6.3.4).

The original issue was a FolderValidity error, which is covered by the offlineimap FAQ. This affected my “All Mail” folder (It also affected my “Sent Mail”, but it got lost in the noise of the 67964 messages in All Mail). The recovery process is simply to remove that folder (and it’s sync history), and start over. Unfortunate, but fine. That’s why I’ve got a 28Mbit connection, after all.

Using devtodo with multiple projects

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:34:29 -0700

I’ve tried (and failed) to use many different pieces of software designed to manage todo lists. The main reasons I’ve failed is because the software either has a high learning curve, bad documentation, or it is cumbersome to use.

I’ve finally struck gold with devtodo. Out of the box, it is almost perfect, but there are a few little issues:

It expects .todo in the current directory
It has no ability to track what you are working on.

I’ve managed to work around both of those with some extra functions in my .bash_profile.

Reverse Find

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:54:00 -0700

I recently had need to do a reverse find, and couldn’t discover any programs that offer this functionality. I decided to work around the issue using a bash function, loops, and find.

This function can be stuffed into your ~/.bash_profile, and referenced wherever you need it.

rfind()
{
    rfind_path=&quot;${PWD}&quot;
    while [[ &quot;${rfind_path}&quot; != &quot;/&quot; ]]; do
        rfind_search_paths=&quot;${rfind_search_paths} ${rfind_path}&quot;
        rfind_path=$(dirname &quot;${rfind_path}&quot;)
    done
    
    find ${rfind_search_paths} / -maxdepth 1 $@ -print -quit
}

As an example, let’s say I’m in /home/user/docs, and I execute rfind somefile.txt. rfind will actually build a command and execute the following: