On Mac keyboard, there is F4 key which opens Spotlight¹ by default. I use Raycast² a lot instead of Spotlight and wanted to remap F4 to Raycast.

There is an app called Karabiner-Elements³ which can be used to remap keys. After the app is installed, we can use this rule⁴ called Map F4 to cmd+space.

You can import the rule from the above URL directly. Once the rule is imported & enabled, F4 will be remapped to cmd + space as shown in the video below.

While monitoring an ETL pipeline, I browse a lot of files and often need to know how many lines are there in a file. For that, I can switch to that directory from terminal and run wc -l for that.

To avoid the hassle of switching to the directory and running a command in the terminal, I wrote a simple lua script to show line count column in xplr¹ file manager.

Failed Attempts

Initially I set out to write a Finder² plugin to show the line count column. But I couldn't find a way to get the line count of a file in Finder plugin. I have explored other GUI file managers but none of them have a way to show custom columns with line count.

Finally, I stumbled upon xplr a TUI file manager, and it was a breeze to write a lua script to show the line count column.

xplr - line count

xplr can be installed via brew.

$ brew install xplr

$ xplr --version
xplr 0.21.3

xplr reads the default configuration from ~/.config/xplr/init.lua. The following configuration shows the line count column in xplr.

version = '0.21.3'

xplr.fn.custom.fmt_simple_column = function(m)
  return m.prefix .. m.relative_path .. m.suffix
end

xplr.fn.custom.row_count = function(app)
  if not app.is_file then
    return "---"
  end

  local file = io.open(app.absolute_path, "r")
  if file then
    local row_count = 0
    for _ in file:lines() do
      row_count = row_count + 1
    end
    file:close()
    return tostring(row_count)
  end
end


xplr.config.general.table.header.cols = {
  { format = "  path" },
  { format = "line_count" },
}

xplr.config.general.table.row.cols = {
  { format = "custom.fmt_simple_column" },
  { format = "custom.row_count" },
}

xplr.config.general.table.col_widths = {
  { Percentage = 30 },
  { Percentage = 20 },
}

This will show a row count on launch.

Conclusion

xplr is a very powerful file manager, and it is very easy to write lua scripts to create custom columns. I couldn't find a way to sort items based on the custom column. Need to explore more on that.

There are a lot of guides on setting up GeoDjango and PostGIS. But most of them are outdated and doesn't work on Mac M1. In this article, let us look at how to set up GeoDjango on Mac M1/M2.

Ensure you have already installed Postgres on your Mac.

Install GeoDjango

The default GDAL version available on brew fails to install on Mac M1.

$ brew install gdal
==> cmake --build build
Last 15 lines from /Users/chillaranand/Library/Logs/Homebrew/gdal/02.cmake:
    [javac] Compiling 82 source files to /tmp/gdal-20231029-31808-1wl9085/gdal-3.7.2/build/swig/java/build/classes
    [javac] warning: [options] bootstrap class path not set in conjunction with -source 7
    [javac] error: Source option 7 is no longer supported. Use 8 or later.
    [javac] error: Target option 7 is no longer supported. Use 8 or later.

BUILD FAILED
/tmp/gdal-20231029-31808-1wl9085/gdal-3.7.2/swig/java/build.xml:25: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details.

Total time: 0 seconds
gmake[2]: *** [swig/java/CMakeFiles/java_binding.dir/build.make:108: swig/java/gdal.jar] Error 1
gmake[2]: Leaving directory '/private/tmp/gdal-20231029-31808-1wl9085/gdal-3.7.2/build'
gmake[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:9108: swig/java/CMakeFiles/java_binding.dir/all] Error 2
gmake[1]: Leaving directory '/private/tmp/gdal-20231029-31808-1wl9085/gdal-3.7.2/build'
gmake: *** [Makefile:139: all] Error 2

We can use conda to install gdal. Create a new environment and install gdal in it.

$ conda create -n geodjango python=3.9
$ conda install -c conda-forge gdal
$ pip install django
$ pip install psycopg2-binary

Once installed, you can check the version using gdalinfo --version.

Remaining dependencies can be installed via brew.

$ brew install postgresql
$ brew install postgis
$ brew install libgeoip

Let's create a new django project and add spatial backends.

$ django-admin startproject geodjango

Add django.contrib.gis to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'django.contrib.gis',
]

Add the following to DATABASES in settings.py.

DATABASES['default']['ENGINE'] = 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis'

Since we used conda to install gdal, we need to set the path to gdal in our django settings. Run locate libgdal.dylib to find the path to gdal.

GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH = '/opt/homebrew/anaconda3/envs/geodjango/lib/libgdal.dylib'

Similarly, we need to set GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH as well.

GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH = '/opt/homebrew/anaconda3/envs/geodjango/lib/libgeos_c.dylib'

Now, we can create a new app and add PointField or any other spatial fields to our models.

$ python manage.py startapp places

from django.contrib.gis.db import models

class Place(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    location = models.PointField()

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at how to set up GeoDjango on Mac M1. We used conda to install gdal and brew to install other dependencies.