Florenz the Lizard
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florenzthelizard.bsky.social
Florenz the Lizard
@florenzthelizard.bsky.social
45 followers 110 following 66 posts
Computer science doctoral candidate at a public university working on computational sustainability. Aspiring educator. Free software advocate.
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florenzthelizard.bsky.social
After five long years I think I finally have a working and comfortable Emacs config! The secret was "server-after-make-frame-hook" which for some reason never came up in my searches for "emacs hook that runs after a frame is created." I used it to make sure treemacs starts with each frame. :P
Emacs window with treemacs and tab-line-mode enabled showing a perl program.
March 17, 2025 at 6:53 PM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
For an upcoming video project I needed to type out some code/commands but really don't want typos or lots of backspacing in them so I wrote a script that can record a remote machine while typing stuff into it. This is a demo recording/mock up and I think it came out really well.
December 24, 2024 at 3:53 AM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
C++ Tip 4!

The order you declare variables in a struct or class matters! Member variables are put in memory in the order they are declared but they will be aligned/padded to blocks the size of the largest member. Generally its best to order member variables from smallest to largest or vice-versa.
Color-highlighted C++ code demoing how variable order can effect the amount of padding and therefore size of structs or classes. The code: #include <iostream> using namespace std; struct bad { double a; int b; double c; int d; }; struct good { double a; double c; int b; int d; }; int main() { // This would output "sizeof(bad): 32" cout<<"sizeof(bad): "<<sizeof(bad)<<endl; // This would output "sizeof(good): 24" cout<<"sizeof(good): "<<sizeof(good)<<endl; return 0; } A small screenshot of a terminal showing the program in the previous picture being compiled and ran.
November 17, 2024 at 4:03 AM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
C++ Tip 3!

Ever needed a simple container that could optionally be empty? Well in the standard template library there is std::optional and its for just this! It can be evaluated as a boolean to see if its empty and filled or changed using the equal sign operator. This was added with C++17.
Color-highlighted C++ code demoing the STL class std::optional. The code: #include <iostream> #include <optional> using namespace std; int main() { optional<int> opt; if (opt) { // Would evaluate as false cout << "Container is full! Value: " << opt.value() << endl; } else { cout << "Container is empty!" << endl; } opt = 17; if (opt) { // Would evaluate as true cout << "Container is full! Value: " << opt.value() << endl; } else { cout << "Container is empty!" << endl; } return 0; }
November 14, 2024 at 7:58 PM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
C++ Tip 2!

In the standard template library there is `std::pair`, and all it does is store two variables together. This sounds basic but can save you the trouble of making a lot of your own helper classes. I have been using it recently for storing vertex-cost pairs for Dijkstra's algorithm.
Color-highlighted C++ code with line numbers demoing the std::pair class. The code: #include <utility> #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main(){ pair<char, int> foo; foo = {'F', 1}; //This would output "F, 1" cout<<foo.first<<", "<<foo.second<<endl; return 0; }
November 13, 2024 at 5:23 AM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
Command Line Tip!

The 'ls' command is aware of when its output is being redirected or piped, if it is it changes its output to one file per line. This means you don't have to do any special processing to use its output in your scripts!
A screenshot of a command line, showing the ls command being run with and without its output being redirected. When it isn't redirected it uses colors and separates everything with several spaces. When it is redirected it outputs the filenames with no color each on its own line.
November 12, 2024 at 6:03 AM
florenzthelizard.bsky.social
C++ Daily Tip!

You can use references with range-based for loops to modify the contents of the data structure you are iterating over! Just make the looping variable a reference with an &.

The following program takes a vector of chars and makes them all lowercase. Its output would be "a, b, c, d, "
Color-highlighted C++ code demonstrating the use of references with a range-based for loop. The code: #include <iostream> #include <vector> using namespace std; int main(){ vector<char> foo = {'A', 'B', 'C', 'D'}; // Range-base for loops can use references! for(char &bar : foo){ bar = tolower(bar); } for(char c : foo){ cout<<c<<", "; } cout<<endl; return 0; }
November 12, 2024 at 5:03 AM