My first program in the AUR

Recently I discovered some more of the incredibly useful features of my favorite text-editor Neovim:

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Entering :read !somefunction in Neovim causes the editor to execute the command somefunction and then insert the echoed response into the file you are currently editing at your cursor position.

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This got me thinking… Maybe I could use this to make my programming more concise. And after installing figlet I was proven right:

# Use `:read figlet "Example"`
#     and then select the output and comment it out: `:'<,'>norm ^i# `
#
#  _____                           _
# | ____|_  ____ _ _ __ ___  _ __ | | ___
# |  _| \ \/ / _` | '_ ` _ \| '_ \| |/ _ \
# | |___ >  < (_| | | | | | | |_) | |  __/
# |_____/_/\_\__,_|_| |_| |_| .__/|_|\___|
#                           |_|
echo "It works!"

And after all this thinking I was stuck with an idea, which I had for quite some time already, but never really knew how to implement in vim:

I can use this, to show complex math formulas in programs, as actual math formulas {: text-align: center}

The problem however was, that no package I searched for seemed to provide the ability to render math formulas as ASCII / ANSI / Unicode. And therefor I just set out to create my own program:

prettymath

The programming was the easy part. Just write a python script that internally parses expressions using SymPy and then pretty prints them. But publishing this program with none more than ~50 lines of code was a real pain.

1. Publish to GitHub
2. Create an account on https://aur.archlinux.org
3. Use my .ssh/config
4. Generate an ssh key: $ ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/aur
5. Clone your future repository: git clone ssh://[email protected]/your_package_name.git
6. Put your PKGBUILD in there
7. Add, Commit, Push

SSH Configuration

$ cat .ssh/config
Host aur.archlinux.org
User aur
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/aur

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And after all this struggle, which even drove me to reddit because I had no clue anymore on what to do, I was able to install my package using the AUR:

yay -S prettymath-git

What does it do?

After having installed prettymath-git, you can do stuff like this:

before prettymath

import math

def normalDistribution(x):
    return 1/sqrt(math.pi)*math.e**(-x**2)

after prettymath (:read !prettymath -u "1/sqrt(pi) * e**(-x**2)"; :norm ^i#)

import math

def normalDistribution(x):
    #    2
    #  -x
    # e
    # ────
    #  √π
    return 1/sqrt(math.pi)*math.e**(-x**2)