I am looking for a way to quickly access the latest file/directory on the command line, preferably in ZSH.
ls -d *(om[1])
Gives me just that, and if I want to use to with a command, e.g. less *(om[1])
This works as well.
However, it is tedious to type all the brackets, and I use this a lot - hence I am looking for a way to create a shortcut for this string.
I've created a function in the .zshrc-file
lf(){
ls -d *(om[1])
}
, which I can use like this:
less <$(lf)
less <`lf`
, but I find this still less than ideal.
less |lf
does not work.
Is there a way to quickly access the latest file without the use of "hard to type characters"? Ideally, it would just be something along the lines of
less LATEST
Any ideas?
You could use the _most_recent_file (^Xm).
_most_recent_file (^Xm)
Complete the name of the most recently modified file matching the pattern on the command line (which may be blank). If given a numeric argument N, complete the Nth most recently modified file. Note the completion, if any, is always unique.
-- zshcompsys(1) BINDABLE COMMANDS
So, we can get the most recent file with typing CTRL-x-m. For example:
% less ;# typing `CTRL-X m` here, we could get:
% less newest-file-or-directory
And we could specify some patterns here, so for example:
% less *.log ;# when I want the newest *.log:
% less newest.log
It is necessary to have some autoload -Uz compinit; compinit in the ~/.zshrc though.
You want a zsh global alias
alias -g latest='*(om[1])'
less latest
Related
I'm using oh-my-zsh which pipes the output of some functions like git diff and git log into less, whilst this is great for reading the output in the terminal. If I need to refer back to it it isn't possible after quitting with :q
Is there an option to preserve the current view on the file in my terminal after quitting?
Secondly, If there is an option where would I need to edit my oh-my-zsh config to ensure anything piped to less passes this option?
To prevent less from clearing the screen on exit you can start it with the option -X:
less -X FILE
If you want to pass this option automatically to every instance of less, you can set the LESS environment variable accordingly in your ~/.zshrc:
export LESS="-X"
Note:
If your shell has syntax coloring enabled, the -X option will cause your less output to display those color change escape sequences as inline ESC text.
This can be fixed by also passing the raw-control-chars display option, -r. For example:
export LESS="-Xr"
This also includes instances where less is started by another program, for example man. If you want to disable this option for a single command, you can just prepend LESS=. For example
LESS= man less
For Git specifically, this can be handled with the following
git config --global color.ui true
git config --global core.pager 'less -Xr'
I would like to issue a patch command which is somewhat dumber than the default, but I cannot find the right flags (if they exist at all).
I don't want it to create .rej or .orig files, not even when the patch fails. If the patch fails I'd like the original files to remain unchanged.
I don't want it to try guessing if the patch is reversed or not, or try matching the lines before or after those given in the patch. If the lines at the given line numbers do not match, it should fail.
I've tried with -f -N -V never -r - --no-backup-if-mismatch, but still backup files are created and "fuzzy" matching is tried.
Run it with --dry-run -s and only apply if it doesn't report any problems (you may be able to key off the return code).
For disabling the fuzz, you need -F0
In a Linux or Mac environment, Vim’s glob() function doesn’t match dot files such as .vimrc or .hiddenfile. Is there a way to get it to match all files including hidden ones?
The command I’m using:
let s:BackupFiles = glob("~/.vimbackup/*")
I’ve even tried setting the mysterious {flag} parameter to 1, and yet it still doesn’t return the hidden files.
Update: Thanks ib! Here’s the result of what I’ve been working on: delete-old-backups.vim.
That is due to how the glob() function works: A single-star pattern
does not match hidden files by design. In most shells, the default
globbing style can be changed to do so (e.g., via shopt -s dotglob
in Bash), but it is not possible in Vim, unfortunately.
However, one has several possibilities to solve the problem still.
First and most obvious is to glob hidden and not hidden files
separately and then concatenate the results:
:let backupfiles = glob(&backupdir..'/*').."\n"..glob(&backupdir..'/.[^.]*')
(Be careful not to fetch the . and .. entries along with hidden files.)
Another, perhaps more convenient but less portable way is to use
the backtick expansion within the glob() call:
:let backupfiles = glob('`find '..&backupdir..' -maxdepth 1 -type f`')
This forces Vim to execute the command inside backticks to obtain
the list of files. The find shell command lists all files (-type f)
including the hidden ones, in the specified directory (-maxdepth 1
forbids recursion).
If I execute ls command with pipe to less, I get strange output
ESC[00mESC[00mfile1.ccESC[00m
ESC[00file2.ccESC[00m
ESC[00file3.ccESC[00m
(means ESC string in between).
Without ls, the output is:
file1.cc file2.cc file3.cc
How to correct this?
I'm guessing that you have the --color=always option to ls set, either through an alias, functions or the LS_COLORS environment variable and ls is sending color directives to a non-terminal (that is, your pipe to less).
Use less -R or set the LESS environment variable to -R.
What you're seeing are ANSI escape sequences for setting colors. Run ls --color=no.
You need to make less output raw control characters using less -r.
It seems like the only way to do this is to pass the -i parameter in when you initially run less. Does anyone know of some secret hack to make something like this work
/something to search for/i
You can also type command -I while less is running. It toggles case sensitivity for searches.
You can also set the environment variable LESS
I use LESS=-Ri, so that I can pump colorized output from grep into it, and maintain the ANSI colour sequences.
Another little used feature of less that I found is starting it with +F as an argument (or hitting SHIFT+F while in less). This causes it to follow the file you've opened, in the same way that tail -f <file> will. Very handy if you're watching log files from an application, and are likely to want to page back up (if it's generating 100's of lines of logging every second, for instance).
Add-on to what #Juha said: Actually -i turns on Case-insensitive with SmartCasing, i.e if your search contains an uppercase letter, then the search will be case-sensitive, otherwise, it will be case-insensitive. Think of it as :set smartcase in Vim.
E.g.: with -i, a search for 'log' in 'Log,..' will match, whereas 'Log' in 'log,..' will not match.
It appears that you can summon this feature on a per search basis like so:
less prompt> /search string/-i
This option is in less's interactive help which you access via h:
less prompt> h
...
-i ........ --ignore-case
Ignore case in searches that do not contain uppercase.
-I ........ --IGNORE-CASE
Ignore case in all searches.
...
I've not extensively checked but the help in less version 487 on MacOS as well as other Linux distros lists this option as being available.
On MacOS you can also install a newer version of less via brew:
$ brew install less
$ less --version
less 530 (POSIX regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2017 Mark Nudelman
References
less is always case-insensitive
When using -i flag, be sure to enter the search string completely in lower case, because if any letter is upper case, then its an exact match.
See also: the -I (capital i) flag of less(1) to change this behavior.