dotfiles tools wrappers

I’m a self-confessed fan of Visual Studio Code’s dev container experience and have a number of posts about them including a list of some of my favourite things with dev containers. I find it productive to be able to capture the pre-requisites for working with a project programmatically, and share it with others working on the project. However, there’s a feature of dev containers that I use heavily which has the potential to break this model: dotfiles. [Read More]

Fun with WSL, GitHub CLI and Windows Notifications

Part 2: Using toast for richer desktop notifications

Introduction In the last post we saw how to create a drop-in replacement for notify-send. This allowed us to take a script that used notify-send and run it without modification. In this post, we’ll take a look at how we can update that script to take better advantage of Windows notifications. At the end of the last post, the notification was fairly generic as shown below: In this post, we’ll update the script to indicate whether the run finished successfully or not, change the title to “GitHub”, and include an “Open in Browser” link: [Read More]

Fun with Git for Windows, SSH Keys and Passphrases

Disclaimer: this post is one to file under “things I’m blogging in the hope that I find the answer more quickly next time”. Background I switched to using SSH key auth for GitHub and Azure DevOps Repos a long time ago and never looked back. For a while I was using SSH keys without passphrases but got round to adding passphrases a while back. I set up the Windows OpenSSH Authentication Agent - the service defaults to Disabled so I set it as Automatic start and nudged it to Running. [Read More]

Fixing Clock Skew with WSL 2

Getting errors because your WSL 2 clock is out of sync? FOllow these steps to automatically sync it

Visual Studio Code and Dev containers in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

UPDATE (2020-04-08): With the 1.44 release of Visual Studio Code (and the corresponding Remote Containers release), the Insiders release is no longer needed as the . I have updated the post to reflect this (update made in vscode dev container on stable release 😁). Introduction In my previous post I gave some thoughts on using Visual Studio Code dev containers. Until very recently your source code needed to be cloned in Windows in order to be able to build and run dev containers with Visual Studio Code. [Read More]