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Almost everyone I know types this without thinking anyway, so save your fingers and put this in your .bashrc:

cdd ()  {
    builtin cd "$*" && ls -lah
}
alias cd='cdd'

‘TIL’ is commonly used on the internet as shorthand for ‘Today, I Learned’, and it inspired me to make a little tool to keep track of things that I’ve learned. I can’t recall a day in recent memory where I didn’t learn something, no matter how seemingly insignificant. I think it would be interesting to keep track of these things over the course of a year or so, then go back and look through all the little bits of information that have been picked up along the way.

This is really a simple little CLI app, but it faithfully records whatever you have to say, across multiple lines and with (hopefully) whatever funky symbols you choose. It’ll also pick 3 of your old random entries and show them to you, to remind you of things you found interesting enough to write about in the past. Hopefully, it’ll surprise you some day and bring back some great memories. If nothing else, it’s a good way to prove to yourself that you do learn something every day.

Installation:
NOTE: Rubygems is broken right now so it’s not available as a Rubygem just yet…hang tight!

$> gem install clispell

Usage:

$> til
What did you learn today?  Press ^d (ctrl+d) when done.
You can pass fsck '-O -' to show a progress bar while it's running
=> Saved!
On 2011-09-06 23:18:53 -0400 you learned how to use Jeweler to release stuff again

On 2011-09-06 23:36:29 -0400 you learned You can pass fsck '-O -' to show a progress bar while it's running

On 2011-09-06 23:18:23 -0400 you learned eggs.

Clicky kitty:

I’m a really big fan of CLI software, but sometimes you just need a GUI app, like a web browser (lynx would be so awesome if someone made a real-time image-to-ASCII-art converter plugin…I’ll work on that some day). I spend a lot of time in my gnome terminal (I use the awesome GNOME Shell) and the only keybinds I really need are:

• Alt+Q – Previous Tab
• Alt+W – Next Tab
• Alt+Shift+Q – Move Tab Left
• Alt+Shift+W – Move Tab Right

Using these, I feel every bit as efficient as when I used to use tiling WMs (I used to really like Awesome and wmii). However, Firefox lacks these shortcuts or the ability to customize them, and my fingers eventually got sick of the keyboard yoga required to tab around in Firefox (Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab by default). I knew there must be a better way, and I was right. The best part is that I didn’t even have to re-compile FF, which would have been ridiculous, but I’ve been known to do worse things in the name of making software work exactly like I need it to (one of the greatest parts of FOSS, IMO).

To pull off this hack, we’re going to grab the newest version of the KeyConfig Firefox extension. The version on the official Firefox add-ons site is a bit out of date and doesn’t work with FF6 properly. You might need to install Nightly Tester Tools and do the “override add-on compatibility” dance if you find that Firefox won’t let you install it.

Once you have that all set and have restarted Firefox, hit Ctrl+Shift+F12 to open up KeyConfig. We’re going to add two keys:

1. name: Previous Tab, id: xxx_key1_Previous Tab, shortcut: Alt+Q, code:

   gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(-1, true);
   

2. name: Previous Tab, id: xxx_key1_Next Tab, shortcut: Alt+W, code:

   gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(1, true);
   

Then just apply and let dry. Try holding Alt and using “Q” or “W” to cycle through your tabs now! Amazing!

If you want to mess with some different keys, you’ll probably want to dig through the latest browser2xul document and figure out what the actual code you need to pass to Firefox would be. Here is the one that I struck gold with. YMMV, and happy hacking!