Projects

In 2019, I bought a Fitbit Versa smartwatch, which still adorns my wrist to this day. I chose it because it was a relatively-inexpensive option with multi-day battery life that was compatible with my (work-issued) iPhone, but for which I could theoretically write software from Linux.

I wanted to personalize it, but I never found a clock face in the marketplace that I liked better than the default one—so I made my own. It was meant to evoke the aesthetic of vintage printed computer ads.

I still use this face, but I never bothered to publish it, and I consider it complete for my own purposes. I’m unlikely to make any further changes until/unless it proves necessary in order to use it with a later model.

When I rediscovered chess in 2020, I also discovered the PGN file format for the first time. I’m consistently fascinated by things that blend the digital and the analog—PGN files resemble a handwritten move list, but are standardized enough for a computer to interpret them—so I decided to try writing a PGN parser for fun.

I took it just far enough to tokenize a valid move list before losing interest. It was never intended as a “serious” project, and there’s no compelling reason to return to it; mature PGN-parsing libraries already exist.

In 2018, with the help of a third-party replacement MagSafe charger, I briefly revived my partner’s 2009 MacBook in order to recover the files from its hard drive. In particular, they had a lot of photos in an iPhoto library.

The photos themselves were easily accessible, but only as one big heap of files with auto-generated file names along the lines of IMG_0001.JPG. The metadata that organized them into named collections only existed within iPhoto; and not only was iPhoto discontinued by that point, but we were moving the files to a Windows device.

iPhoto kept its metadata in a Sqlite file, iPhotoMain.db. I wrote a little C# command-line program which read that file and copied all the photos into a directory structure based on the “event” tag.

Although it has long since served its purpose, this project will always be a bit special to me: both as a personal example of situated software, and because it was the first software project I ever published online.

A collection of VS Code themes intended to blend in with popular GTK themes, most-notably-to-me including both the light and dark variants of Ubuntu’s Yaru theme.

This project was originally created by Nathan Graule. I discovered it in August 2018 while looking for a theme to use in Ubuntu, and ended up trying to make one myself using Nathan’s Communitheme… theme (as Yaru was originally called) as a starting point. I posted a screenshot on Twitter of my efforts, and Nathan encouraged me to submit it.

Later, in October, Nathan asked me if I’d be interested in taking over the project, which I did. Over the next couple of years, I made few more new themes and revamped a couple of the existing ones. It’s been a while now since I’ve done much of anything with this, though I might still be willing to come back to it if someone asked for a specific improvement.

In 2020, I tried out diff-so-fancy, but I ran into a weird issue with background highlight colors in Windows. It seemed like the Perl binary that shipped with Git-for-Windows (at the time; it may have improved since then) was the culprit—understandably, because having a terminal emulator on Windows that could actually handle anything but the most basic ANSI color codes was still a very new prospect. So, that weekend, I did the obvious thing and… re-implemented the logic in native PowerShell.

It worked, too—until I got back to work on Monday and discovered that the less binary that shipped with Git-for-Windows (again, at the time) had the same problem. In the absence of any other decent pager for Windows, there wasn’t much point in continuing after that.

A vaguely cyberpunk theme for static websites built with Hugo. This site used this theme from its launch in 2019 until my 2022 redesign.

Oddly, all commits prior to June 2022 seem to have disappeared from the master branch, including mine below; but they survive on the webpack branch.

My only contribution was to re-generate the prism.js file with support for PowerShell syntax enabled, for the sake of my post “Emulating Linux ‘man’ in PowerShell.”

• 223b753 Add highlighting for PowerShell syntax (2020-10-19)

A PowerShell module that incorporates customizable Git status information into the shell prompt, which I use daily.

I implemented autocomplete for custom --format=/--pretty= formats defined in a user’s .gitconfig file.

• f2defd4 Add tests for pretty format autocomplete (2020-10-22)
• 53b0c22 Refactor gitConfigKeys (2020-10-22)
• ce376ff Autocomplete user-defined pretty formats (2020-10-20)

A Bash reimplementation of posh-git, which I have also contributed to. Having grown accustomed to posh-git at work, this became my preferred Git prompt for Linux.

I implemented a handful of minor tweaks that brought posh-git-sh’s presentation closer in line with posh-git’s, after the two projects had diverged a bit over time.

• 9fd10d9 Show local status summary symbol (! or ~) (2020-10-04)
• 0da4ec8 Use high-intensity ANSI escapes instead of bold (#41) (2019-04-09)
• c6aa7cf Show ahead/behind counts (#37) (2019-03-27)

An NPM module that can generate a complete VS Code color theme from a relatively-limited set of base colors. Used for my own Linux Themes for VS Code project.

I wrote documentation for some advanced configuration options that, previously, you would have had to read the code to find; made it possible (and, indeed, default) for escape characters in strings to be highlighted in a slightly different color than other characters; and added support for VS Code version 1.29’s then-new ability to use different accent colors to distinguish between tabs in various combinations of focused, unfocused, modified, and unmodified.

• e40ae11 Add support for modified tab borders (2018-11-18)
• 588930b Add `stringEscape` to `syntax` section of README.md (2018-10-07)
• 319e044 Add `stringEscape` to `syntax` (2018-10-06)
• c4b47ba Add escape characters to language examples (2018-10-06)
• 110248b Make second example complete (2018-10-06)
• 17bc217 Fix typos (2018-10-06)
• 4bfc4e2 Add API information to README.md (2018-10-05)

A VS Code extension that implements Vim features, including modes, macros, keybindings, and ex commands. It also incorporates features from a handful of popular Vim plugins. I use this daily.

I implemented the ability to read some limited settings—specifically, key mappings—from a user’s .vimrc file in addition to their VS Code configuration, so those mappings could be more easily shared with real-Vim and other Vim-emulation plugins, such as that for Visual Studio. Unfortunately, so far as I’m aware, .vimrc support hasn’t advanced any further since then.

• 31581945 Read key remappings from .vimrc (#3908) (2019-11-09)