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Alex Saveau

Build better tooling

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Projects

GitHub repositories I've built.

Ringboard—the clipboard manager for Linux
Test utilities I use.
Adapters to convert between different writable APIs.
Gnome Clipboard History is a clipboard manager Gnome extension that saves what you've copied into an easily accessible, searchable history panel.
File Tree Fuzzer creates a pseudo-random directory hierarchy filled with some number of files.
Modern, performance focused unix commands
`ask` offers a simple way to ask a yes or no question on the CLI, returning exit code 0 on "yes" and 1 on "no".
ForkFS allows you to sandbox a process's changes to your file system.
A benchmark comparing Bevy against PixiJS
:robot: Easy, efficient, and collaborative FIRST robot scouting
A Tetris-like puzzler with a twist
Version Orchestrator provides an effortless and performant way to automate versioning your Android app.

GitHub repositories I've helped build.

GPP is Android's unofficial release automation Gradle Plugin. It can do anything from building, uploading, and then promoting your App Bundle or APK to publishing app listings and other metadata.
Optimized UI components for Firebase
Simplify Android M system permissions
adapter for RecyclerView to display app's oss dependencies' license

Blog posts

Articles I've written.

Ringboard: the infinitely scalable clipboard manager for Linux

Jul 21, 2024

Ringboard is a simple yet powerful clipboard manager, designed for Linux to be desktop environment (DE) agnostic. It is implemented using a client-server architecture (with a Unix Domain Socket) which enables using a command line interface (CLI) for lower level operations, a terminal user interface (TUI) for a convenient yet unobtrusive interface, and various graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Currently, the clients include a stand-alone GUI implemented using egui and a TUI implemented using ratatui with plans for a COSMIC applet (issue) and Gnome extension (issue). Ringboard strives to be as efficient as possible, use a minimal constant amount of memory, scale to massive clipboards, and be composable with the rest of the ecosystem. In brief, it hopes to become The One Clipboard manager for Linux.

Fast Unix Commands

Mar 24, 2023

Fast Unix Commands (FUC) is a project that aims to create the world’s fastest Unix commands. Currently, this means rm and cp replacements named rmz and cpz (the ‘z’ stands for “zippy”). When better performance cannot be achieved, the next highest priority is efficiency. In practice, rmz appears to be the fastest file deleter available while cpz wins in most cases, only losing in flat directory hierarchies.

ForkFS: make changes to your file system without consequence

Mar 23, 2023

ForkFS is a CLI app that redirects a process’s file operations to a sandbox.

Tests validate behavior, not correctness

Aug 14, 2022

Is it better to have tests that confirm incorrect behavior, or none at all? I’m here to argue that tests are valuable even when they assert what a human considers to be an incorrect result. Pushing this idea even further, a test asserting incorrect behavior should be added in a separate commit before fixing the behavior in another commit.

Gnome Clipboard History

Feb 24, 2022

Gnome Clipboard History (GCH) is a Gnome extension that saves what you’ve copied into an easily accessible, searchable history panel. The primary innovation over existing clipboard managers is the use of a compacting log for persistent storage.

File Tree Fuzzer

Jan 02, 2022

File Tree Fuzzer (FTZZ) is a CLI tool written in Rust that lets you generate pseudo-random directory hierarchies filled with some number of files, each of which can be empty or contain some number of pseudo-random bytes. The pseudo part is important: it means FTZZ will generate the exact same directory hierarchy given the same inputs. This makes FTZZ useful for benchmarking other programs like rm or cp since you can run them again and again on the same exact set of files.

The fastest way to copy a file

Nov 26, 2021

I’m on a mission to find the fastest way to copy and delete files on a modern machine. I thought a quick Google search would reveal the answer, but I only found this Stack Overflow post with people’s opinion on the matter (but no proof), a discussion on what the kernel can do to improve performance, and various articles claiming you should tar directories to copy them faster (there’s no chance of that being faster than a properly written parallel cp implementation).

Automate deleting old Google emails and calendar events

Feb 18, 2021

Google introduced auto deletion for web, YouTube, and location activity back in 2019, but hasn’t come out with official solutions for their other products yet. Notably, gmail and gcal have data that likely isn’t needed after some number of months.

Server-side analytics with Firebase Hosting

Sep 12, 2020

Client-side analytics slow down your website and are inaccurate at best, especially in communities like ours that tend to disable trackers. Until recently, Google Analytics and its equivalents were the best you could do with a static site hosted on Firebase. No more! Firebase Hosting introduced Cloud Logging to address this shortfall.