Fish environment variable for just one command

Happy Fish shell user for years, but I’m never able to remember how to set an environment variable for a single command. Maybe I’ll remember if I write it down:

env SOME_VAR=1 command

Changing working directory in tmux

I tend to keep a long-lived tmux session per project that I’m working on. When I want to start a new project though, it carries the old working directory with it. I keep forgetting what I need to do to type it, so hopefully this TIL makes me remember it for the next time.

To switch the current working directory, do a :attach -c <newdir>. And to do it it even more easily, I bound it in my tmux configuration to Meta-w:

bind M-w attach -c "#{pane_current_path}"

SSH Tunnels

I often rely on SSH tunnels to forward remote ports locally. For example, to control my remote installation of Resilio Sync. There is a lot of flags you can set, but these are the flags that work best for me:

ssh -CqTnNf -L 8889:localhost:8888 [email protected]

In this example, I forward the remote localhost:8888 port to my local 8889. The flags do the following:

• C: Compress the data.
• q: Silent modus.
• T: Disable pseudo-tty allocation.
• n: Prevent reading stdin.
• N: No remote commands, just forwarding.
• f: Run in the background.
• L: Specifies the forward.

Now, if you want to exit the tunnel, you could kill SSH pkill ssh, but this will kill all your SSH connections. I multiplex my connections and can run: ssh -O exit [email protected]. You would need this in your ~/ssh/.config to be able to do that as well:

Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h-%p

Rust project templates

Rust never stops to amaze me with its command-line tools and today I found out about cargo-generate which enables you to setup a repository which will function as a project template for Rust.

As an example, to pull down the repository and start a new project, you would do:

cargo generate --git https://github.com/githubusername/mytemplate.git --name myproject

Staying up-to-date with Rust

I have this tick where I continuously check that my tools are running the latest version. I guess you could call it a form of FOMO.

Luckily, Rust has me covered with two packages which check that for me.

cargo-outdated which check that your project dependenies are up-to-date. And cargo-update which checks that your Rust executables, like cargo-edit are running the latest version.

It will even update itself!