Quickly Edit Posts

Recently I automated starting new posts with a python script. Today I want to work on the next part that is editing those posts quickly.

Quickly Edit Posts Recently I automated starting new posts with a python script. Today I want to work on the next part that is editing tho read more waylonwalker.com

Check out this post about setting up my posts with python 🐍

Enter Bash

For the process of editing a post I just need to open the file in vim quickly. I dont need much in the way of parsing and setting up the frontmatter. I think this is a simple job for a bash script and fzf.

1. change to the root of my blog
2. fuzzy find the post
3. open it with vim
4. change back to the directory I was in

bash function

For this, I am going to go with a bash function. This is partly due to being able to track where I was and get back. Also, the line with nvim will run fzf every time you source your ~/.alias file which is not what we want.

Let's set up the boilerplate. It's going to create a function called ep "edit post", track our current directory, create a sub-function _ep. Then call that function and cd back to where we were no matter if _ep fails or succeeds.

boilerplate

ep () {
    _dir=$(pwd)
    _ep () {
        # open file here
    }
    _ep && cd $_dir || cd $_dir
}

Creating Reusable Bash Scripts Bash is a language that is quite useful for automation no matter what language you write in. Bash can do so many powerful system-level tasks. Even if you are on windows these days you are likely to come across bash inside a cloud VM, Continuous Integration, or even inside of docker. read more waylonwalker.com

check out this post for more information about writing reusable bash scripts.

FZF

Let's focus in on that _ep function here that is going to do the bulk of the work to edit the post.

cd to where I want to edit from

cd ~/git/waylonwalkerv2/

Next I need to find all markdown pages within my posts directory. There is probably a better way to filter with the find command directly, but I am not worried about perf here and I knew how to do it without google.

find all markdown

find ~/git/waylonwalkerv2/src/pages/ | grep .md$

Now that we can list all potential posts, sending the selected post back to neovim is as easy as piping those files into fzf inside of a command substitution that is called with neovim.

putting together the edit command

$EDITOR $(find ~/git/waylonwalkerv2/src/pages/ | grep .md$ | fzf)

Final Script

final ep function

ep () {
    _dir=$(pwd)
    _ep () {
        cd ~/git/waylonwalkerv2/
        $EDITOR $(find ~/git/waylonwalkerv2/src/pages/ | grep .md$ | fzf)
    }
    _ep && cd $_dir || cd $_dir
}