Jeff Valcher

Termfu is an easy-to-use, multi-language TUI debugger that allows you to create and switch between custom layouts. My preferred setup is a terminal running tmux and Neovim on one screen and a browser on the other. I couldn't find a terminal-based debugger to suit my needs, so here we are. Vimspector came close (great project). However, I wanted something a little further left on the UI complexity spectrum that also allowed for multiple, easy-to-configure layouts. To that end, I made all key bindings single-key, which can be documented on screen via custom (l)abels. I decided to have some fun with the layout creation process, which uses "key-binding ASCII art" to set header command order and window size ratios. I had very little experience with C going in, so there are undoubtedly multiple idiosyncratic solutions throughout. Somewhere along the line I got it in my head that a C project is a rite of passage and that a slow debugger is unnatural. If it wasn't for Gookin's Ncurses guide, I might already be dead.

While working on my debugger, termfu, I started to notice the emotional latency I was suffering from deciphering GCC's error messages. Finally I decided that enough was enough and put together a Python script that uses GCC's -fdiagnostics-format=json flag to separate and color the individual errors and warnings, providing reader-friendly output for -Wall, -Wextra output. This has made a huge difference in my mental health.

Jul 20, 2024 update: socket.io has stopped working with Firefox, so no image fetching updates are showing even though they are being fetched. There are no issues with Chrome. This Express app sends your address to Google's Civic Information API to fetch your political representatives at every level of government. I was curious how web scraping worked, so (at the expense of making rapid image API calls) I decided to scrape the first Google Base64 image result for each representative with Selenium. I also set up a socket to display the number of representative images left to fetch. While putting this app together, I had my first experience with React in a web development class that gave me vertigo from the abstraction level. As a result, I decided to put together my own vanilla JavaScript templating engine for this project.

July 1, 2024 update: YouTube has changed to scrolling numbers, and this script no longer works. The first thing I look at while a YouTube video is loading is the view count. For some reason the design team picked a font size and layout that makes it blend into the surrounding context. This simple script modifies the view count and date styling for better readability.