This is a list of tools that I’d like to have and things that I’d like to know how to do. I’m looking for suggestions, so contact me if you have ideas! My hope is that I will be able to build my own solutions as my programming skills complete.
Hotkey combination to move all of the windows in a given workspace to another workspace. Works under Unity 7 in Ubuntu 16.04.
I want to pop open a terminal and quickly grab peoples’ contact info. Should support importing data from the CSV produced by Google Contacts.
I use Unicode symbol insertion frequently, so I want to pop open a terminal and quickly grab the hex code for a given unicode symbol.
Let’s say I have a list/array and I want to print it as a formatted table.
In Bash, I can use C-style string formatting with printf:
a=(1 2 3 4 5 6 7)
printf "%s\t%s\n" ${a[*]}
1 2
3 4
5 6
7
note that ${a[*]} notation mass-expands the array elements.
This works because printf reuses the format string until all arguments are consumed.
I don’t need to worry about how many elements are present in a.
In Python, this is NOT the case:
a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
print("{:<4}{:<4}".format(*a))
1 2
note that *a notation mass-expands the list elements.
.format() does NOT reuse the format string.
.format() returns once all of the placeholders have been filled, regardless of how many arguments are passed to it.
So what’s the idiomatic way to accomplish this in Python? I came up with this:
a = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
cols = 2
for row in [a[i:i+cols] for i in range(0,len(a),cols)]:
s = '{:<4}' * min(cols,len(row))
print(s.format(*row))
1 2
3 4
5 6
7
Am I being dumb here? Is there a better way?
Bash Hackers Syntax Wiki: http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/arrays
Bash Printf Syntax Basics: https://linuxconfig.org/bash-printf-syntax-basics-with-examples
“If there are more arguments than specifiers the format string is reused until all arguments had been depleted. “