Well, seems I haven’t posted here since that last sphobjinv release post, for v2.1 … been focused on writing code for one project or another.

sphobjinv v2.1 is out!

I recently wanted to set up tweepy, to drive a little content-feed Twitter bot via Github Action. The tweepy docs have a pretty thorough how-to for setting up authentication, but it seemed pretty complicated and daunting, and seemed to be targeted at someone needing to set up automated 3rd-party app authentication for users.

I spend a decent amount of time at the commandline, for various reasons. At work, it’s usually at Windows cmd; at home, it’s either cmd, or bash on Debian. In both places, a major activity is working with Python, virtual environments, git, etc.; on the Linux box, I’m also doing a variety of other stuff as well. On both platforms I have a bunch of shell invocations that I don’t want to have to type out in full every time. This post lays out some ways that I’ve found to implement these sorts of shortcuts, and which of these approaches I currently prefer to use.

I do a lot of writing at work.

While I work mainly on Windows, I’ve also been using Debian Linux for quite a while, with a first dabbling in the sarge era and then a more prolonged, ongoing experience with the recent wheezy/jessie/stretch sequence (list of all Debian versions). I currently am maintaining a dual quad-core Xeon Dell PowerEdge (purportedly a cast-off from a Facebook server farm, interestingly…) that’s running stretch, which I’m using for development and for running some odds-and-ends quantum chemical calculations. In the course of finalizing my PyCon 2019 recap post, I had reason to use some of the Linux/Unix CLI tooling in a way I hadn’t had to before. I imagine most of this post will not be particularly novel to many, but I was pleased at how quickly I was able to get the info I needed.

Two years or so ago, I was delighted to learn that PyCon was going to be in Cleveland for both the 2018 and 2019 meetings, putting it only about a 3-hour drive from my house. I’d been hacking on Python stuff for a few years by that point, and was excited to have the chance to rub elbows with some of the people I’d been interacting with online in various ways. In 2018, I got to say hello to the big Python podcasters, Michael Kennedy , Brian Okken , and Tobias Macey , as well as Travis Oliphant , Ernest W. Durbin , Brett Cannon , and numerous other well-known figures in the Python universe. I also had the chance to eat lunch with Guido and others from Dropbox, which was quite fun. All in all, it definitely whetted my appetite to return in 2019.

Going back at least the past several versions of Office, Word has implemented a split-screen editing mode, where the top and bottom portions can be scrolled independently to different portions of the open document:

UPDATE 4 (5 May 2020): In addition to the links below, Brett Cannon wrote a new post in March 2020 providing further background on PEP517/518 and pyproject.toml, and showing a couple of examples of minimal configurations for using setuptools with pyproject.toml.

The default Word keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement usually work pretty well for me. I realized today that one thing that’s really been bugging me is the inefficiency of selecting the word under the cursor using only the keyboard. I find that I’m often wanting to select a specific word to then, e.g., toggle its highlight with my Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H custom macro. With the mouse, a simple double-left-click is all that’s needed; with the keyboard, though, unless there’s a shortcut/command I don’t know about, I have to press at least two key combos: