Weeknotes 68

Neovim 0.8 was released recently and includes a new option called cmdheight, which, if set to 0, hides the command-line unless in-use. A nice way to free up some vertical space.

(Via Neovim 0.8: What’s new?).

Harry told me about the <details> HTML element.

The

HTML element creates a disclosure widget in which information is visible only when the widget is toggled into an “open” state. A summary or label must be provided using the

element.

Pretty handy.

The * key in Neovim is used for searching the word under the cursor. Since Neovim 0.8 it now works with visual selections too, which comes in handy when you want to search for more complex strings.

Playwright is an end-to-end testing tool ala Cypress. We’ve been thinking about moving to it for it’s speed, and ability to run tests in different browsers in parallel. From my limited experience I’m a fan.

On the subject of testing. I’ve decided that flake-free end-to-end tests (that are actually useful) are more or less impossible to create. Retry-ability is key.

Jean Boussier doesn’t seem to sleep. pitchfork, a new Ruby HTTP server option is now in pre-release.

I finally released the first (pre)version of pitchfork.

A new Ruby HTTP Server optimized for latency and memory usage

The memory savings sound impressive!

Git 2.38 introduced a new --update-refs feature which I learnt about from GitHub’s blog. If you find yourself following a workflow where you have branches that branch from each other in order to incrementally ship a feature you might find that --update-refs makes your life easier.

main -> feature_a -> feature_b -> feature_c

Say you have a commit that exists on all feature branches and it needs to change. If you make the change on feature_a you need to manually rebase each branch based on feature_a because the commit sha will have changed.

With -update-refs you can make the change on feature_c and have the changes propagated down to feature_a and feature_b automatically.

The Browser Company are building a new web browser called Arc. We definitely need competition in the web browser market, so it will be interesting to see what comes of this. Will it use an existing rendering engine or something completely new? I’m interested to see.

My Raycast extension to search Hex that I mentioned last week was accepted into the Raycast Store, so that’s cool 🥳