I love my prompt, always have and always will. I spend so much of my life in a terminal, usually with half a dozen mini terminals open in each tab. As such I like to tweak it and get it as perfect as possible for my life, needs and even mood.

In the past I’ve had quite a large PS1 that covers multiple lines and gives a lot of information, after having that PS1 in one form or another for some time I decided it was time for a change, to a smaller PS1 that takes up a lot less space.

So here it is, the first image is my standard PS1 when in a git repository, the red @ means a file hasn’t been added to Git, a blue @ means a tracked file has been modified but not stage and finally a green @ means a file is staged …

Over the last week I’ve been doing a huge amount of refactoring of Blackhole as well as writing dozens of additional tests. To make Blackhole more testable I needed to make a big change to how the program is launched and controlled.

setup.py scripts vs. entry_points

Whenever I’ve written Python programs that require some kind of command line script I’ve always used distutils’ scripts, this can be seen in blackhole’s setup.py on GitHub or in the three line example below.

scripts=[
    'blackhole/bin/blackhole',
],

In doing so, it allowed me to be lazy and write a lot of prodecural code in the main “binary” which made it pretty much impossible to test. You can also see that on GitHub in the main “binary”.

I’ve noticed that most people who write Python packages that have some kind of command line entry point use distutils …

Pelican is a Python-powered static blog generator that processes ReStructuredText and Markdown articles and pages and converts them to HTML. I use Pelican to power this blog.

There is a YouTube RST directive built in to Pelican core but it really shouldn’t exist there.

I submitted a pull request for Pelican core to enable Vimeo videos in articles but that request was declined because it didn’t belong in the core. So I decided I would write it as a plugin instead and while I was doing it, also wrote a plugin for YouTube so that it could be removed from the core.

There is a decent amount of detail in the Pelican documentation on how to write plugins, I’m not going to cover the whole process but I thought I would cover a little of what I did.

Adding an RST directive

Really all we’re doing …