Forem: Aubrey Portwood

👋🏻 Valet

Aubrey Portwood — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 16:52:30 +0000

After about three months of using LocalWP I switched back to Laravel Valet yesterday. LocalWP just made my workflow a bit tedious:

The Site Shell works, but I just wish wp worked in the site folder.

Turns out creating a site for each context (at work) resulted in about 20 sites being created this quarter. This turned out to feel really inefficient.

Blueprints turned out to be hard to maintain. Not that it's super hard, but it became a nuncance to update them and prune old ones.

Don't get me wrong, LocalWP is great. Totally. But here's what I'm doing now:

I have one site in Valet for my work (affiliatewp-dev) and it's setup just the way I like it. One WordPress install. One setup. No blueprints.

The repo I work on, mostly, is symlinked in my ~/Repos folder (I use ghq to manage repos). Now, I just have one repo... all my work... one place.

To "switch" between cases I just use a command that uses wp to export the DB and re-setup WP at a blank slate. I can switch back and forth through databases using a command I setup called wpdbs. It just exports the DB and imports the other by name. I can switch contexts this way much easier with one WP install and one repo cloned... and of course switch branches at will.

This was my old setup, and it turned out to feel more intuitive and easier to work with. I thought LocalWP would make development feel easier, but it didn't.

If you're curious about wpdbs checkout my dotfiles.

CMD+P & VSCode

Aubrey Portwood — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:33:27 +0000

What am I missing about VSCode? I don't get why it's so popular... I can't even get it to go to a file in the directory tree using CMD+P?

VSCode even has its own tag on DEV!

💻

Aubrey Portwood — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 05:47:30 +0000

So I took down my external monitor.

About three months ago I hooked up my 27" monitor, a bluetooth keyboard, some book-shelf speakers and was pretty happy... until I wasn't... today.

The monitor is showing some signs of ghosting, and everyone once in a while it flickers. I really didn't want the Apple Magic Keyboard (external) because of the janky arrow keys, so I bought what I thought was the best BT keyboard I could find. It takes 2.5 seconds to re-connect, it often "fights" with whatever signal my Magic Mouse was using, jets out some random characters, and finally connects. It doesn't have touch-id so I have been manually typing my super-hard password everyday! I mis-type it about half the time. I had to use the bookshelf speakers remote control to switch it to Bluetooth before my computer would connect to it, so I also bought a dock and wired it, but I still had to turn them on....

I think you get the point. It just never works out for me when I try to do this... An external monitor is nice, but the setup always comes with some price I have to pay.

My MacBook Air has a screen and a keyboard ATTACHED to it, and it works...all the time!

So, I took all that shit down and am just back on my 💻

...again.

It always feels weird going from this big-ass screen to this tiny 13" one. My desk always feels a bit empty and barren too...it's always nice to have your desk full of big tech 💪🏻! But, it just isn't meant to be.

I missed ⌨️👈🏻 Touch ID so much.

How to disable the Lock key on a non-Mac Bluetooth Keyboard

Aubrey Portwood — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 05:11:39 +0000

I have been searching the Internet for the answer to this, and it turned out to be quite simple.

You don't need Karabiner-Elements, just run:

defaults write com.apple.loginwindow DisableScreenLockImmediate -bool yes

That disabled the stupid Lock key above the Delete key! I hit this thing all the time, and I have a really complicated password!

Can anyone recommend a modern CSS course?

Aubrey Portwood — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 02:21:39 +0000

I would like to learn some modern CSS (not really looking for things like SASS, Tailwind, etc) via a course (or courses) online to get re-acquainted with all the cool things CSS can do in 2023!

Yes, a re-cap of the basics would be nice, but I think I am already here
Focus on things like CSS Grid, flexbox, @media, and CSS variables would be great!

Looking for really great paid/un-paid courses!

Video-based > Text-based, but I'll take either!

Thanks!

Firefox DE...we're back together!...for a weird reason

Aubrey Portwood — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 14:35:47 +0000

First off, I have never liked using Google Chrome for development. The only reason I DEV in it is because it's a popular browser. That's it...

Recently I have had a bit of a paradigm shift in how I manage windows and tabs on my Mac. I use spaces now. I am preferring windows over tabs (but not spaces over tabs, that's evil, and wrong)...

All this to say that one little annoyance, related to this, has me switching back to Firefox DE (Developer Edition) for my development browser.

You remember when I said I preferred windows over tabs? Well, let's say I have a Chrome window on Space A doing Work X... and I have one on Space B doing Work Y...and I need to open a link on Space C to do Work Z... Well, if I click that link I get a new tab on random Space X, Y, or Z (probably the last window I used).

That's not what I want. I've tried every hack to make sure a new link opens a new window on Space C (my current space) in Chrome, but, like Google does, there just isn't a reasonable way.

To my surprise, Firefox DE (and Firefox itself) on MacOS follows the behavior I have setup on Mac.

This setting should dictate everything. Most apps follow the rules here, not Google Chrome. But, like I said, FFDE seems to like to follow the rules I set on my own computer.

How I use Choosy + Shareful to copy clicked (external) URL to my clipboard instead of opening in a browser on MacOS

Aubrey Portwood — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 17:32:09 +0000

So what I want is for external links to just go to my clipboard! Then I can decide what to do with the URL. But, with Choosy and Shareful I can do so much more. I can copy the URL to my clipboard (just like I wanted) and I can also send that URL to other apps like Messages, Mail, Notes, and more!

Checkout the video on this post on how I did it. You will need to install Choosy and Shareful to accomplish it.

Note, I updated my Rule in Choosy to this (which is a bit different than the video):

What going light would look like, for me

Aubrey Portwood — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 22:08:07 +0000

Ever since macOS added dark mode I have been a user. Using dark mode in the OS, my text editor (Sublime), Github, etc.

But today I tinkered around with what using light mode might look like for me:

As you can see I would have to compromise a little with Sublime and iTerm, I just can't find a good enough color scheme that is all-white or off-white, so I went with a theme I've used in the past and enjoyed.

I've always felt a bit of nostalgia using light themes, so I often wonder if I'd ever use one. But for now back to dark mode...

How to set custom profile avatar in Google Chrome (macOS) w/out changing your Google Account picture

Aubrey Portwood — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:32:01 +0000

Set your avatar to the cat one
Goto /Users/.../Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Avatars
Replace avatar_origami_cat.png with the custom avatar you want

Even though it shows as the cat icon:

It will still show up as the custom avatar w/out having to change your Google Chrome profile.

...and in tools like Choosy:

Need to use shellcheck with .zsh and or #!/bin/zsh scripts? [SC1071]

Aubrey Portwood — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 05:16:13 +0000

If, like me, you find yourself trying to use shellcheck to lint .zsh files with #!/bin/zsh but it keeps telling you:



shellcheck: error
error - ShellCheck only supports sh/bash/dash/ksh scripts. 
Sorry! [SC1071]

What I was able to do is pass the --shell=bash argument to shellcheck and then it would lint my files.

In my case this was configured in my SublimeLinter config, like so:



{
    "linters": {
        "shellcheck": {
            "args": [
                "--shell=bash"
            ]
        },
    }
}

...just in case you are using Sublime Text!

CLI Tools in PHP is harder

Aubrey Portwood — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:49:21 +0000

In case you're wondering what's easier:

Writing CLI tools e.g. shell scripts + zsh plugins
Writing CLI tools using PHP e.g. symfony/console, PHP-CLI, etc

#2 is harder. I tried it over the weekend.

Want better keybinding parity between micro and Sublime Text?

Aubrey Portwood — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 20:28:59 +0000

I went through the key-bindings in Micro (which use different modifier keys) and added them to Sublime Text:

    { "keys": ["ctrl+s"], "command": "save", "args": { "async": true } },
    { "keys": ["alt+up"], "command": "swap_line_up" },
    { "keys": ["alt+down"], "command": "swap_line_down" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+left"], "command": "bol" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+right"], "command": "eol" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+o"], "command": "prompt_open" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+z"], "command": "undo" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+y"], "command": "redo" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+c"], "command": "copy" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+x"], "command": "cut" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+d"], "command": "duplicate_line" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+v"], "command": "paste" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+a"], "command": "select_all" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+b"], "command": "toggle_terminus_panel" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+q"], "command": "close" },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+up"], "command": "move_to", "args": { "to": "bof" } },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+down"], "command": "move_to", "args": { "to": "eof" } },
    { "keys": ["alt+backspace"], "command": "delete_word", "args": { "forward": false, "sub_words": true } },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+f"], "command": "show_panel", "args": { "panel": "find", "reverse": false } },
    { "keys": ["alt+shift+f"], "command": "show_panel", "args": { "panel": "find_in_files" } },
    { "keys": ["ctrl+t"], "command": "show_overlay", "args": {"overlay": "goto", "show_files": true} }, // Hurts transpose, but never use.
    { "keys": ["ctrl+e"], "command": "show_overlay", "args": {"overlay": "command_palette"} },