Thought from Terminal

Purpose

So I added a section of the webpage where I can add fleeting thoughts in tiny bubble. Just like a former blue website. Then I thought huh, wouldn’t it be swell to be able to do this from the terminal?

Then the thought became a tiny function in my .zshrc. And now I can shoot thoughts straight from the terminal right into my website. How cool is that?

How?

I built up the string’s static parts and used cat to grab a multiline string for the thought. Then I added an empty <div> on the page to be able to determine where to add the new thought, then I used awk to find that anchor and add lines below it. Lastly I opened a subshell, cd into the directory, added the thought to the file and did the whole git add commit push thing. Then GitHub takes over, rebuilding the site and presto, a fresh thought!

The line is just a guide for the max width of a thought. I don’t want any weird stuff with phone screens, so I make it pretty short - 52 characters max.

Code

The code is ugly, but whatever. Here it is:

function thought() {
    echo "End with Ctrl+D twice\n\n"
    echo "------------------------------------------"
    THOUGHT="$(cat)"

    echo ""

    FULL="
\`\`\`sh
> date +\"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S\"
$(date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')
> cat thought
\"
$THOUGHT
\"
\`\`\`
"

    (
        cd ~/tedwall.se/src/content/docs
        git pull

        awk -v insert="$FULL" '
        /hidden-anchor-for-start-of-thoughts/ {
            print
            print insert
            next
        }
        1
        ' fleeting-thoughts.mdx > tmp && mv tmp fleeting-thoughts.mdx

        git add .
        git commit -am $(date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')
        git push
    )
}