make-theme-image: a script to make yourself an idea of a icon theme

I created some time ago a utils repository on github to publish miscellaneous scripts, but it's only recently that I have started to really populate it. One of my recent work is make-theme-image script, that downloads an icon them package, grabs relevant, user-specifiable, icons, and arrange them in a neat montage. The images displayed are the results of running

~ make-theme-image gnome-icon-theme moblin-icon-theme

This is quite useful to get a good idea of the icons available in a package. You can select the icons you want to display using the -w option. The following command should provide you with a decent overview of the icon themes present in Debian:

apt search -- -icon-theme | grep / | cut -d/ -f1 | xargs make-theme-image

I hope you find it useful ! In any case, it's on github, so feel free to patch and share.

Variations around ls -lrt

I have been using almost compulsively ls -lrt for a long time now. As per the ls man page, this command lists the files of the current directory, with the latest files at the end, so that they are the ones that show up just above your next command-line. This is very convenient to work with, hmmm, not-so-well-organized directories, because it just shows what you're working on, and you can safely ignore the rest. Typical example is a big Downloads directory, for instance, but I use it everywhere. I quickly used alias lrt="ls -lrt" to make it easier, but... I though I might have as well a reliable way to directly use what I saw. So I came up with the following shell function (zsh, but probably works with most Bourne-like shells):

lrt() {
    ls -lrt "$@"
    lrt="$(ls -rt "$@" | tail -n1)"
}

This small function runs ls -lrt as usual, but also sets the $lrt shell variable to the latest file, so you can use it in your next commands ! Especially useful for complex file names. Demonstration:

22:05 vincent@ashitaka ~/Downloads lrt
[...]
-rw-r--r-- 1 vincent vincent   1490027 Apr  2 15:44 k.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 vincent vincent    668566 Apr  3 22:05 1-s2.0-S0013468617305947-main.pdf
22:06 vincent@ashitaka ~/Downloads cp -v $lrt ~/nice-paper.pdf
'1-s2.0-S0013468617305947-main.pdf' -> '/home/vincent/nice-paper.pdf'

This saves typing the name of the 1-s2.0-S0013468617305947-main.pdf: in this case, automatic completion doesn't help much, since many files in my Downloads directory start with the same orefix... I hope this helps !