Friday, June 29, 2012

Efficiency though Keyboard Shortcuts

One of the things I learned from the discussion of my recent Lisp posting was the value of delegating work to a good editor and the possible speed gain of good keyboard shortcuts. While I did not agree that the best path to these goals was necessarily through Emacs, I did decide to try to use my keyboard a bit more efficiently than I have been.

First, I reviewed the various keybindings already used by my OS, Windows 7. Hey, that Windows Logo key actually does have a few valuable uses! I also realized that I never use my function keys very much.

I also installed AutoHotKey and tried a few simple useful bindings, including:

  • Capslock is now Ctrl. (Shift+Capslock acts as normal Capslock)
  • Right Alt and Right Ctrl are now equal to Shift+Alt and Shift+Ctrl.
  • Win+q quits a program (like Alt+F4) and Win+c opens a command prompt.
  • The right-click menu button (AppsKey) is now a special function key. For example, I use it with various letters as shortcuts to certain directories when I'm in Windows Explorer.

I'm still working on actually using some of these on a regular basis, though. (Old habits die hard.) I'm also trying to use my alt keys with my thumbs without taking my fingers off the home keys, and using tab (replaced appropriately with spaces) more often when coding.

Anyway, it's all rather nerdy, but the possibilities are exciting. If you work on Windows, check out AutoHotKey. You may want to customize your system across all your different applications--especially if you start thinking about all the hundreds of possible key combos currently going unused on your keyboard!


Unit-testing a Python CGI script

This summer I'm overhauling Tamarin, my automated grading system. Under the hood, Tamarin is little more than a bunch of Python CGI scripts. However, as I overhaul it and convert it from Python 2 to 3, I also wanted to build a proper unit test framework for it.

It's been a dozen years or so since I last used Perl and CGI.pm, but I recall running my scripts on the command line and manually specifying key=value pairs. So, I was somewhat surprised to find no comparable way to test my CGI scripts in Python. The official Python cgi module documentation suggests the only way to test a CGI script is in a web server envirnoment. That's an unnecessarily complex environment for quick tests during development and precludes any simple separate unit tests.

In general, I'm not very impressed with the cgi module docs. In fact, browsing around revealed that there are a number of parameter options undocumented in the official docs.

Using this found information, I was able to build my own cgifactory module. Depending on the function called, it allows you to build a cgi object based on either a GET or POST query. For example:

  form = cgifactory.get(key1='value1', key2='v2')

If you then write your CGI script's main function to take an optional CGI object, you can easily build a CGI query, pass it to your script, and then run string matching on the (redirected) output produced by your script. Of course, most of your unit tests will probably be of component functions used by your script, but sometimes you want to test or run your script as a whole unit. cgifactory will help you there.

The cgifactory code is available here, where you'll always find the most recent version. The code itself is actually quite short; most of the file is documentation and doctests showing how to use it. I don't guarantee it's right, but it's worked for me so far. Hopefully it might be of use to someone else too! Feel free to copy, modify, and/or redistribute.

(Oh, and if you really need a command line version, it shouldn't be too hard to write a main that parse key=values pairs into a dictionary and then calls cgifactory.get(pairs) to build the CGI object.)