The secret life of strings

An interesting discussion about bytes, code points and grapheme on the PHP internals mailing list explains why the notion of string length isn’t relevant.

Per this discussion, the grapheme extension functions will now be supported for UTF-8 encoding by OmniTools.

Console love

Among the trending projects on GitHub in January was glow, a Markdown viewer for CLI.

Fauve noticed epr, a CLI reader for ebooks in ePub format The author made made that evolve into epy, to support more formats and features. If you’re interested to mix those modern tools in a BBS, Nasqueron has a project for that.

If you work a lot in tmux, you’ve noticed it can be a pain to manage a consistent history. During a brainstorming session on IRC #wolfplex, I’ve suggested we could build a solution writing in real-time the history into SQLite, so we can share history across different zsh, and avoid some of the corruption. The good surprise is that solution already exists, it’s called ZSH History Database, or zsh-histdb and it does exactly that: publish history into a SQLite database. The author explained his own motivation in this reddit post.

Photo of the month

While early 2022 is mostly about James Webb Space Telescope, my current wallpaper is a photo taken by Hubble of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217.