I played a lot these days with xdotool, to try to automate some stuff for my Elgato Streamdeck.

These are the things I try to do:

• Select a window, and send a Keyboard sequence (such as CTRL+B to mute/unmute a Teams call)
• Type emojis to the active window 😅
• More a window around, or resize it

Here are some links that I found about xdotool:

• Xdotool - Window Stack
• Xdotool - Examples

Below are the commands I found useful during my research.

As I prepare and run a lot of scripts, sometimes I need to run a script at a precise time of the day.

When a script must be only run once, cron is not a viable solution. So I discovered the at scheduler

You need to install it first, using apt as usual.

$ sudo apt install at

Schedule a command to run

1. use the command at with a time / date
2. input the commands to run in the prompt
3. type CTRL+D to exit (^D)

$ at 9AM       
warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh
at> cd workspaces/github/dotfiles
at> git pull
at> <EOT>
job 1 at Sat Apr 16 09:00:00 2022

This example will pull a repository contents at 9 AM tomorrow !

This short articles shows how to setup a global .gitignore file, to exclude files or directories for all your git repositories.

This is very useful for editor files or .env file, and prevents accidental commits. I also added common directories for Java and NodeJS related developments (target/ and node_modules), and IntelliJ IDEA files (*.iml and .idea/)

Thus said, you should also always setup a .gitignore file in your projets, as the global file only work for you, and will not be shared with the code of your project.