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Showing posts from March, 2018

Fixing xref-find-references

I was annoyed that xref-find-references searched more than the files in the TAGS file (it seems to search everything below the top level directory of the TAGS file?) so I went looking for a fix. I found that apparently my emacs knowledge is out of date (the fact that it's xref now and not tags was my first clue). I couldn't find any way to customize xref-find-references . Instead I found people referring to project, ivy, helm, confirm, The Silver Searcher (ag), ripgrep (rg), and dumb jump. I didn't go all the way and get into project or ivy or any of the others, but I did download ag and rg and tried them from a command-line outside of emacs and saw exactly what I was expecting xref-find-references to do. I figured all I needed was to replace xref-find-references with one of those. I got ag.el installed and working before any of the ripgrep packages (there's both rg.el and ripgrep.el) and then struggled to remap M-? to call ag-project instead of xref-find-refe

It Is Time To Replace Passwords With Keys

It is time to stop using passwords. The Troy Hunt article, Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era just got passed around the office again and wow, what a mess we are in. Instead of passwords we should switch to using public-key cryptography like TLS and ssh use. "But people can barely manage passwords, there's no way they can manage keys!" Wrong. People can't barely manage passwords, they can't manage them at all. Read the Troy Hunt article where he says, "Embrace Password Managers." We've given up on humans managing passwords and we are now relying on software to do it. We use software that securely stores our passwords and synchronizes them over the internet so that we have those passwords on all our devices. Often the software generates the passwords for us too. Guess what we could do with keys? The exact same thing. Now read the Troy Hunt article again and this time think about how it's not just end-u