Real vs percieved simplicity

There are certain command line tasks I need to do every few weeks or months, which is infrequently enough that I need to look up the syntax every time I do them. For example:

• Undoing a commit
• Getting ripgrep to return only the text which matches a regular expression, not the whole line
• Executing a command against all files in a directory

A solution

To save time searching for how to do these things, I decided to create my own command line tool, cookbook, which would let me save examples (or 'recipes') for these tasks. I wrote this in Python, and it's about 70 lines of code with whitespace and comments. Because I wanted it to be simple, it shells out to other programs if it needs to do anything complicated. For example, the edit command just opens a file in Vim.

Issues

My cookbook tool worked well, until it didn't. I ran into several issues:

1. The cookbook script wouldn't be in my $PATH, so the command wouldn't work
2. I'd try and run it on a computer which didn't have Python 3 installed
3. cookbook stores examples for each tool in a separate file. You search for examples using the name of the tool, but some tools could plausibly be indexed by multiple names. For example, ripgrep is known by both ripgrep and rg. I use neovim as my text editor, and I could never remember if I'd stored examples under neovim, nvim or vim

By definition, these issues would crop up when I was trying to do something else, so I'd work around them, rather than fixing them.

Real vs perceived simplicity

Over time, I realised that the real problem was with my entire approach. I'd tricked myself into thinking that my solution was simple because the code I'd written was simple.

In retrospect, it's obvious that my initial approach was too complex. I fell into a trap which is easy to fall into as a programmer. When you learn to code, a world of automation, improved productivity and control opens up to you, and every problem becomes solvable by writing a script or a command line tool. Writing this code feels good, but it's important to remember that while lots of problems can be solved by writing code, they're not always best solved by writing code.

A simpler solution

I've since switched to storing these examples in a single file, which I search through with grep, and edit with Vim. There's no custom code involved.