ReSnap on clouds' Blog

How Auto-formatters Save Lives

fabian.weik@protonmail.com (Fabian Weik) — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 20:59:56 +0200

I know what you are thinking. How in the world should an auto-formatter safe lives. Well, maybe I exaggerated a little — But I think auto-formatters reduce many bugs without running the program. “How should they do this if they do not change the semantics,” you may ask. Well, let me explain.

A Shell-formatter anecdote

Recently, I did some maintenance on the reSnap project. A user had opened a pull request fixing screenshots on newer version of the reMarkable software. I looked at the changes on my phone, since I was not at my computer. As far as I could tell, the changes were good — they even updated the documentation in the README.md. But one thing bugged me. In the following part of the diff, they used byte_correction and byte as a boolean variable, which probably should have been the same.

reSnap Maintenance

fabian.weik@protonmail.com (Fabian Weik) — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 15:02:11 +0200

I have this script called reSnap. It is a tool to take screenshots of your reMarkable tablet over SSH. This way you can use it over Wi-Fi. The main inspiration and source of most code and ideas was reStream, a script to live stream what is being displayed on the tablet over SSH.

The script makes use of lz4, a fast compression algorithm. To install this on the reMarkable tablet, one would use Toltec, a package manager for the reMarkable tablet. Installing this disables the automatic updates on your tablet. Which is a good thing, because just a week ago someone brought to my attention, that using Toltec with never versions of the reMarkable software might brick your tablet. Here is the issue. Basically new users can’t use the script, because they have no supported way of installing lz4 on the tablet.