On occasion it is nice to have a way to open a file in Vim without having to jump over to the terminal. I researched a few GUI options like VimR or MacVim and others but all had problems. MacVim didn’t support FZF and wasn’t built on Neovim, VimR and others didn’t quite feel polished/stable enough.

After a bit more research and trial and error I found that I could create an Automator app with an AppleScript which would accomplish what I wanted.

Here is the script if you want to try it out.

on run {input, parameters}
  try
    set filePath to POSIX path of input
  on error errMsg
    set filePath to ""
  end try

  tell application "iTerm"
    create window with default profile
    tell front window
      tell current session
        if filePath is "" then
          write text ("vim; exit")
        else
          write text ("vim " & quote & filePath & quote & "; exit")
        end if
      end tell
    end tell
  end tell
end run

To use this script, open Automator and create a new Application, then choose “Run AppleScript” and drag it into the workflow. Paste the above script in then save the application and you are ready to go. This script opens iTerm but it could be modified to use Terminal too.

Storing data in a JSON column in Postgres can be very handy but a bit more difficult to query than normal tables. In particular, querying arrays of objects had me stumped for a while.

The trick is to use jsonb_array_elements to expand the array into a row for every object. Then each object can be queried individually by using the ->> operator extract a key and use it in a where clause.

Conceptually this isn’t much different than a one to many inner join where, because of the join, you can have a row mostly duplicated in the query output after it is joined.

For example:

So let’s say you have a user address and have an addresses which is a JSONB column, containing multiple address objects.

The following query expands the addresses into multiple rows, then uses the ->> operator to extract the zip field and then finds any that are equal to 78701.

select *
from "user" u, jsonb_array_elements(u.addresses) as obj
where  obj->>'zip' = '78701';

Just like with an inner join there might be a need to do a group by to get the result you want but overall it is pretty straightforward!

Read more about the the available JSON operators and functions here.

Often times I have the need to stash some changes in git but don’t want to stash everything.

The solution is to use git stash -p. The -p instructs git to do a stash interactively and will iterate over each changed hunk one at a time and instruct git what to do.

These are the options:

y - stash this hunk
n - do not stash this hunk
q - quit; do not stash this hunk or any of the remaining ones
a - stash this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d - do not stash this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g - select a hunk to go to
/ - search for a hunk matching the given regex
j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e - manually edit the current hunk
? - print help