ronny.haryan.to

If:

• you find yourself typing the same long command in the shell repeatedly, or
• you want to recall some command that you have executed yesterday, or
• you don’t remember the exact options you recently used but you know the command or parts of the command line,

then you might be interested in this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Somebody asked how to quickly disable search matches highlighting in vim because it tends to be distractful after a while.

Vim has hlsearch and the corresponding nohlsearch to toggle this behaviour (see :help hlsearch for more info). So we could create mappings to quickly disable hlsearch, for example I use F12 for this.

map     <F12>   :nohlsearch<CR>
imap    <F12>   <ESC>:nohlsearch<CR>i
vmap    <F12>   <ESC>:nohlsearch<CR>gv

Many times I came across pictures that I thought would look great for my desktop background wallpaper. However, after I set them to be my wallpaper, they were so good that they looked too “sharp” and they made it hard to distinguish between the desktop items and the wallpaper. (I know some people like having a clean desktop with nothing on it, but I beg to differ.)

I don’t remember exactly how I came up with the idea, I think I saw one of tigert‘s wallpapers, it was blurred. It seemed strange at the moment, I thought “Who would want to look at a blurry picture?”, but I gave it a try anyway. And it actually looked good, it created the illusion that the wallpaper is pushed farther to the background. Just like when you take a photo of your friend, for example, you focus on your friend and not the background.

It’s very easy to blur a picture using GIMP. Simply open the original picture, and apply one of the blur effects/filters, I normally use Gaussian Blur (RLE) with a radius of 5 pixels. You could experiment with other filters and the radius because your screen size (or “resolution”) might be different from mine. This simple trick works great on scenery type of pictures but not celebrity close-up photos and the like.

Original:

Blurred: