Ahh modern scripting power, feel the fresh electrons streaming

Two of my heros today is 1. Simple serialization of objects to files and back and 2. maps.

The project was the following. I'm doing CFD and optimization at work and have a pretty big directory structure where all the work is done and organized. All work is organized from unix shells and I tend to not use much graphical tools (although when hacking java code I've used popular IDE's to shell out the code mainly because java seem to be pain without IDE's and the fact that I'm not especiall y good at java). My observation was that I tend to not write aliases and shell constructs to ease the navigation in the structure and wanted to make a change. So todays project was to make it dead simple to capture navigation habbits.

To solve this I noted that what I want is to capture the 10 most popular navigations from any popular directory x. e.g. have a maping from a directory x to a list of popular directories. and make it possible to list them, to choose from the list and to add new navigation patterns. I also stored this information for the most popular x:s directories.

popularity was capture by move to front lists. Listing was done in a sorted order of the most popular navigations. The sorting was peculiar. basically lexical sorting with the lexicals beeing the directories in the path in reversed order (starting from the bottom directory and upwards). The result is presented in a nice textual n x m tabel with a number tag in front of the directory and and the directories was cropped keeping the last 30 characters of path

I work from about 3-4 different machines using the same home directory. So simply serializing and deserializing the datastructures to a shared file for each invocation solved any persistancy problems although expensive (but I don't notice this)

I implemented this in python, worked like a charm and I'm probably hooked on to this concept for now. (Some key-based assigned icons to speed up the cognitive selection of navigations should have been a boon but you cannot get everything, actually not hard to implement because of open picture libraries but icons in the shell is not well supported)

The interface is this.

  d mydir

this is the same as cd mydir, but stores the navigational pattern via move to front mechanisms

  dd

This list popular navigations from current directory

  d 3

This walk navigation 3 listed by dd.

All this can be generalized but the sketched approach above should be good enough for my need.

By the way what's up with popular languishes like java! Code generation from gui:s, that's totally crazy! Read my lips ... use macros, and if you want to modify, use __macroexpand__ and if java doesn't support it, Invent it! -it's not that hard, the boiler plate is there.

Cheers