Marcin Borkowski: Recent Changes

Updates in the last 30 days

2026-04-25

03:01 UTC (new) (history) 2026-04-25 How I use my numeric keypad with Emacs Ledger mode . . . . mbork – As the readers of my blog know, I’m a heavy Ledger user. One thing that annoyed me was the fact that I couldn’t use my numeric keypad to enter amounts. The reason was simple – the “comma” key on that keypad inserted a comma in Emacs and not a period.

2026-04-20

16:42 UTC (new) (history) 2026-04-20 How to quickly generate the list of all columns in a PostgreSQL table . . . . mbork – It is well-known that select * is an antipattern (except maybe in an SQL REPL). What to do, however, if you have a select * in your codebase and you want to change it to a proper list of column names?

2026-04-13

18:56 UTC (new) (history) 2026-04-13 Binding TAB in Dired to something useful . . . . mbork – I’m old enough to remember Norton Commander for DOS. Despite that, I never used Midnight Commander nor Sunrise Commander – Dired is still my go-to file manager these days. In fact, Dired has a feature which seems to be inspired by NC: when there are two Dired windows, the default destination for copying, moving and symlinking is “the other” window. Surprisingly, another feature which would be natural in an orthodox file manager is absent from Dired

2026-04-05

19:23 UTC (new) (history) 2026-04-05 Easter 2026 . . . . mbork – Christ has risen, rejoice! I have a bit of a rough time right now, but we have Good News – Jesus is greater than our troubles! Like in previous years, rest assured that I will pray a decade of the Rosary for all of you, my dear readers. Hallelujah!

2026-03-30

12:44 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-30 Node.js and .env files . . . . mbork – The more I work with Node.js, the more I appreciate its built-in features. Supply chain attacks are a real thing and the more I can do without pulling in megabytes (or even kilobytes) of dependencies, the better. For example, one of the very common patterns in Node applications are configs in .env files. The traditional way to digest them is to use dotenv, which admittedly has zero dependencies – but nowadays even that is not necessary.