simple-tools-for-research

This respository contains simple tools I use for research workflow. Your mileage may vary! Thanks to ChatGPT for research assistance.

Qualtrics

Some simple Qualtrics Javascript tricks for use in surveys are here. And here is a short checklist to make sure you're not forgetting anything before launching a Qualtrics survey.

Automatically split PDFs

Do you find it annoying to manually export PDFs into separate documents, e.g. for visualizations that gradually appear in a Beamer presentation?

For instance, suppose you have experiment-design.pdf which is five pages long. You can generate five one-page pdfs in the same directory titled experiment-design-1.pdf, experiment-design-2.pdf, ..., experiment-design-5.pdf in one line of code, which saves a few minutes of manually exporting.

The code requires having installed split-pdf, via brew install split-pdf. The code just calls the utility.

Python.
Emacs lisp. Callable via M-x split-pdf, if added to your emacs config.

For loops in Beamer

Do you want Beamer to iterate through several slides that only change the graphic, e.g. for showing figures that gradually appear?

Beamer is smart enough to handle for loops. This is useful when presenting any graphic or figure that gradually appears. It's better to use for loops, rather than copy-pasting the slide and changing the suffix at the end of the pdf names. Copy-paste can introduce errors if you change another part of the slide.

Minimal working example.

One-line Git pull, commit, and push

Do you find it annoying to have to run three or four Git commands on the command line to push updated code or exhibits?

E.g., I use Git to sync between Overleaf and code on the server. Any minor change in Overleaf requires that I enter git pull origin master, git commit -am, and then git push origin master on the server to push a new figure that Overleaf can see. I don't need informative comments for this process and want to do it in one line.

I defined the aliases git pp and git ppu here that make pushing any updated code a one-step process, as long as the code has been staged at least once in the past.

Warning: the only Git comment for pushing it will be "update," so use at your own risk.

Requires that your main branch be called main
git ppu pulls and then pushes
If there is nothing new to pull from the other side, git ppu breaks. Just run git pp instead.
Also defines the aliases: (i) git st for git status, and (ii) git ci for git commit -am, which adds anything that has changed and has already been committed.
As a bonus, it works from within Stata if you just add ! in front of the commands: !git ppu.
Important: new code needs to be staged (git add filename) as normal.