Dotfiles

At the Perl Toolchain Summit a few of us shared our favourite command-line tools and terminal configurations. This compilation covers recommendations from Paul Johnson, Shawn Sorichetti, Mickey Nasriachi, Julien Fiegehenn, and Olaf Alders, including GPU-accelerated terminal emulators like WezTerm, file managers like yazi, advanced Neovim plugins, Git utilities, and system monitoring tools. Each tool includes descriptions and links for practical implementation.

The new “is battery” and “is known battery” subcommands can detect battery attributes with a clean, readable syntax. This post walks through practical examples of replacing complex shell commands with these new subcommands, demonstrating how they simplify a SketchyBar configuration on macOS. Learn how to check battery charge levels, charging state, and even conditionally load menu bar items based on whether your device has a battery.

I wanted a tool for debouncing shell commands, to ensure that tasks like installing nightly builds or running scripts only execute once within a set time period. This is the story of how I finally ended up with a solution that I’m happy with.

I love writing bash scripts, but there are some aspects of it which I find to be a bit tedious. I’ve written “is” to try to make shell programming a little more enjoyable. Let’s look at how to get started with it.