Things I Learned - 05 Apr 2026

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

It’s pretty convenient (on Ubuntu) to be able to move windows around desktops. Apart from the usual Super + Arrow keys to manage windows within a desktop, you can use:
- Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow: Move desktops
- Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Left/Right Arrow: Move window to desktop
- Super + Shift + Arrow: Move window to another monitor
- Super + Drag: Drag window from anywhere
jq . file.json is an efficient way to pretty-print JSON files in the terminal. (Or jaq . file.json, which is ~30% faster.)
GitHub Copilot monthly premium requests were not reset at 12 am UTC
How Diffie Hellman Key Exchange Works by Julia Evans is an excellent explanation. Share a random number. A multiplies it by their private key and shares SA. B multiplies it by their private key and shares SB. They multiply the others’ key with their secret key and they get SAB = SBA. Now both of them have the same new secret they can encrypt/decrypt with, but no one else knows, even though they shared everything publicly! This may be one of the best cool uses of math I’ve seen in a long time.

Shell tricks I didn’t know:

# ALT + . cycles through the last arguments typed
mv file.{txt,md}    # Move file.txt to file.md
ls |& tee file.txt  # Pipe both stdout and stderr to tee

How to review trending GitHub repos on VS Code

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:17:50 +0000

Here’s how I track trending GitHub repos each week. I run a scheduled script that saves a clean TSV I can scan fast.

It uses uvx gtrending to fetch weekly trending repos for:

Rust: High-quality system tools. (Anything in Rust seems cool.)
Go: Reliable CLI/infra tools. (Like Rust, most Go code seems good.)
Python: Most AI/ML stuff
TypeScript: Most modern JS codebases
JavaScript: Most front-end utilities
Shell: Productivity scripts

I pipe results through jq to extract:

Language
Stars: for popularity
Current period stars: for growth
Date: when I run it
Full name
Description

I use awk to de-duplicate by repo and save into a TSV file.

Then I review the TSV in VS Code. I stopped using Excel. Rainbow CSV and Edit CSV make large TSVs easy to scan, sort, and re-structure. (I’m quite excited at the new tricks I’m learning to replace Excel!)

I tag the first column with:

🟣 pending
🔴 ignore (with reason in the last column)
🟢 active (I currently use it)
⏺️ review

I picked these icons carefully. A descending sort puts 🟣 on top (to scan quickly) and ⏺️ at the bottom (for closer review). This also puts top-starred repos in each language first.

The payoff for the right tools is high. This process makes it easy. I found Flameshot, duf and wrkflw this way.

To try it, download and run bash trending-repos.sh and open the TSV it generates.

jq on S Anand

Things I Learned - 05 Apr 2026

How to review trending GitHub repos on VS Code