software on Kevin Heruer

Running Spotify From a Terminal

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 09:36:34 +0100

This post exist of two different projects, the first one is Spotify-tui, and de second is Spotifyd.

Spotify-tui

Spotify-tui is a terminal interface using the web API and is witten in the Rust language, however, it does not play the songs itself. It only uses the API to select/play a song, you’ll need another piece of the puzzle to actually play the music.

Since Spotify-tui is written in Rust it’s very memory efficient and safe, meaning it will never do unexpected things. Running Spotify-tui it only uses 16MB of RAM and it has been running for 11+ hours.

You may argue that 16MB of RAM is a lot, but in the world of applications and even command line applications running on JavaScript it’s a godsend. Spotify itself is around 200MB.

Spotifyd

The other part of the puzzle is Spotifyd, a Spotify daemon written in Rust. It’s a tiny Spotify client using only around 8MB of RAM. However, Spotifyd is not just specifically for Spotify-tui, it’s a generic daemon. You could also use your Spotify app and stream it to the daemon using the device list in the app.

This means you could create your own smart speaker for cheap! Or you could hook up a raspberry pi zero to your old sound system and give your old system new streaming functionalities.

Why I Started Using Nvim

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 17:29:11 +0100

Since I’m on a streak of optimising my workflow in the terminal, I started to use Vi/Vim/Nvim as my default editor. The reason being it’s (almost) always installed by default, and it’s really powerful once you learn only a couple of shortcuts.

Currently I use Neovim on my development machine because it’s fast, extensable and overal very nice to use. The only thing I really have to get used to is the hjkl format of movement, I know you shouldn’t use them often in the first place but as a Vi newbie it’s a very nice thing to fall back to something familiar like the arrow keys to move around. I’m still learning all the stuff real Vi users use like tags and regex searching.

The plugins I currenty use are COC for code prediction, typescript-vim and vim-jsx-typescript for TypeScript highlighting, nerdtree for file browsing, vim-devicons for icons in nerdtree, fzf for fuzzy searching, and of course the dracula/vim plugin for the dracula theme.

So far the shortcuts I use are ZZ, hjkl, ZQ, A, a, i, I, C-b. I also might check out the plugin tagbar for easier code browsing in larger files.

Alacritty

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 11:52:35 +0100

I’ve recently come across a new terminal emulator called Alacritty, it is a new terminal emulator written in Rust. It uses the GPU to accellerate the calculations it needs to make which results in a more responsive terminal, some commands like tree also seem to run faster.

Check out this video from DistroTube:

The terminal emulator is still in beta and does not have any GUI to edit the settings, all settings need to be defined in a YAML config file. It also does not (yet) have tab funcionality, you’ll need to open a new window every time you want another terminal. Of course you could use something like tmux to work around that problem.