Month: August 2017

Previewing Files in tar and zip Archives

Open source software is often distributed as archived code: compressed tar balls (.tar.gz) or as .zip files. A developer might download and install a number of these archives directly in a project they’re working on, or the archive may be installed indirectly via a software module manager like Maven. But sometimes the developer may want

Command line uglify-js

Recently I was working on a small project where I wanted to get some jquery-like functionality in an javascript application but I wanted to keep the downloads as slim as possible. I used zepto.js for the query features: the minified copy of zepto is about 1/4 the size of recent versions of jquery 1.x. But

Making a git alias alias

The git version control system supports an alias feature that provides a way to add shorthand names for frequently used commands.  I’ve set up several aliases over time for frequently used or interesting commands. For instance, a ‘logfiles’ alias that lists a log of commits with the paths to the files that were part of