Maciej Janicki's website

Welcome to my personal website! This is the place where I share my random thoughts, mostly related to programming and advanced GNU/Linux usage, but occasionally also my scientific interests and my hobbies and personal life.

This website is entirely static HTML and contains no JavaScript, cookies, tracking etc. The layout is minimalistic on purpose and optimized to be also viewable in text-based web browsers like w3m or links.

Latest posts

2020-11-08 Following science journals via RSS

Working in academia means having to follow the current state of the research. The “usual” way to do it is downloading PDFs from websites of conferences and journals. It is needless to say that this is terribly inefficient: it requires us to remember when something new is expected to appear, manually navigating through the website etc. Even worse, recently there is a trend to increasingly rely on social media (Twitter, ResearchGate) and bloated, proprietary, data-mining “bibliography managers” (like Mendeley) to get suggestions on what to read. In this post, I describe an efficient, distraction-free and privacy-protecting workflow for keeping up with the latest research.

2020-09-26 Executing code chunks from Vim

Recently “notebook” applications like Jupyter and RStudio have become a popular way of teaching and practicing programming. Their advantage is making programming interactive: you write several lines of code, then execute it and look what happens. You can tinker with your complex data structures and try unfamiliar functions out without the need to rerun the whole script each time. However, this also comes with the massive disadvantage: you are locked down to a GUI application and cannot edit the code with a decent text editor. In this tutorial, I show how to achieve the same effect using Vim, the standard REPL console, and tmux to connect them.

2020-09-20 Having all PDFs just a few keystrokes away

I tend to have a lot of PDF files on my computer: books, science papers, presentations… I often need to quickly open one of them: check a theoretical detail in a book related to what I’m doing or a reference in a paper I’m reading. With the help of dmenu and a short shellscript, I have found a way to make this process as quick and unintrusive as possible.

2020-05-03 Announcing chesstools

The long weekend has been very fruitful for me: after some hours of coding, I can proudly announce version 0.1 of chesstools - a suite of minimalist tools for chess study following the UNIX philosophy. The main component of the package is pgnvi - a vi-like editor and browser for PGN files. It comes with a simple graphical application for drawing the chess board and a few other tools. You can get the package from my Gitlab or Github pages.

2020-01-25 Happy new decade!

It’s been a while since the last post and for me it was a time of big changes. After having received my PhD, I moved from Leipzig to Helsinki to work as a postdoc at the university here. Of course the relocation, getting used to a new country and starting a new job meant a lot of work and effort, which is why I was too busy to update this site for a while. But everything went more than fine and I’m doing well here up north. As for the site, I have a lot of notes and unfinished articles lying around, so now that I’ve settled in the new place, I might share Linux tips more often. Well, I’m not promising anything, we’ll see.

2019-09-04 PhD thesis defended successfully

Last month I had my PhD defense at the University of Leipzig and I obtained my PhD title with magna cum laude. In near future, I will be probably moving to another university and widening my research interests, as I am no longer bound to a single, focused long-term goal. If you are interested in my thesis, you can download it here and the code is available on Gitlab.

2019-07-27 Change to another shell's working directory

Today I’m going to share another trick for changing a shell’s working directory involving the fuzzy finder. Let us assume that you are doing something in a terminal and then need suddenly need another window for working in the same directory. There is an easy way to do this. It involves defining a function, which shows the current directories of all running shells in fzf, so that we can quickly choose one of them and navigate to it.

2019-06-06 Navigate through filesystem quickly with fzf

Navigating to the right directory is one of the most unnecessarily time-consuming tasks while working in the shell. Have you ever found yourself typing long paths by hand and repeatedly pressing Tab because you forgot the name of some directory? Personally, I use a couple of tricks to avoid typing paths. Here’s the most important one.

2019-05-24 Making your keyboard layout more ergonomic

There is no doubt that the keyboard is the most efficient input device to interact with your computer. I use the keyboard for pretty much everything, including web browsing, switching between windows and arranging them, writing e-mails etc. However, many programs require combinations with a modifier key (especially Ctrl) to trigger some functionality. Because of the placement of the modifier keys on the keyboard, repeated pressing of such combinations can be inconvenient and require weird twists and stretches. In this post, I show how to remap certain keys to a much more ergonomic placement.

2019-05-15 Site design finished

I’ve been quite busy since the last post, but yesterday and today I finally found time to finish the site. With the nice index of posts by year and by tag on the right (made with jekyll-archive), it is now more or less complete. There is still some content missing on the “Books” and “Software” pages, but I will fill it incrementally. I also already have multiple posts in preparation - I prefer to work on them in parallel, rather than post them one by one. So, real content is going to appear here very soon!

2019-03-29 Hello world!

This is the first post on this website. I used Jekyll to create it and I must say that I’m quite impressed!

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