JNRowe

If you want an out of the box test then playing with river-classic¹ is probably a good place to start. It gives a feel for where you can go, without having to put too much effort in.

For example, it has pluggable layouts where instead of pulling in a lua module(such as awful.layout) in awesome you'll run an external process which handles events. You can even run multiple managers and switch between them with bindings, or write a custom one to scratch that itch. If you're happy with just awful's .suit.tile.right and .suit.max then basically any backend will do.

This is why it feels like a reasonable path off awesomewm to me. I always considered awesomewm to be the WMConstructionKit, and while river changes how you interact there is still a nice route to extensibility. The newer direction even more so than the -classic offshoot.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river-classic

JNRowe

last monthdiscuss

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

JNRowe

last monthdiscuss

There are plenty of examples where menu display and help texts can be toggled.

For example, aptitude has `Aptitude::UI::Menubar-Autohide` and midnight commander has options in the layout menu to disable menu/buttons/etc. That way beginners get to learn through discovery, and may later choose to switch to calling the menu/action with a keypress. Both of those respond to "standard" F1 for help too.

Would I prefer emacs M-x and C-h style interaction in mc? Yeah, probably. I'm used to it everywhere else(such as zsh). However, as a long term user I can execute basically all the functions even though I've long since disabled the buttons, menus and hints.

JNRowe

4 months agodiscuss

There is a portable unicode¹ tool available, and it is packaged in a bunch of distributions. I'll spare us the full output, but "unicode a→z" produces something like:

    U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
    UTF-8: 61 UTF-16BE: 0061 Decimal: &#97; Octal: \0141
    a (A)
    Uppercase: 0041
    Category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase); East Asian width: Na (narrow)
    Unicode block: 0000..007F; Basic Latin
    Bidi: L (Left-to-Right)
    Age: Assigned as of Unicode 1.1.0 (June, 1993)
    …
    U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW
    …
    U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z

¹ https://github.com/garabik/unicode

JNRowe

4 months agodiscuss

If you want to relive it then simh¹ with mame² might be an option. There appears to be some support for VT11³, along with docs⁴ to use as a starting point.

No, I'm not claiming to have read all one hundred pages already. However, from what I have read I'd love to see a functional demo.

¹ https://simh.trailing-edge.com/

² https://www.mamedev.org/

³ https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/PDP11/pdp11_vt.c

⁴ https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MAME_and_SIMH

JNRowe

10 months agodiscuss

FWIW, zsh has a commands hash to make stuff like this potentially easier and cleaner. The following isn't quite how I'd do it, but is functionally equivalent.

    (( $+commands[vim] )) && alias vi=vim
    (( $+commands[nvim] )) && alias vi{,m}=nvim

JNRowe

10 months agodiscuss

You can, it even ships with two files you can use as examples in mc.{emacs,vim}.keymap. The vim one has my favorite comment in a config file:

    [editor]
    # No remapping, just use vim instead of mcedit

Given that you can specify the bindings config to use at startup with --keymap you can even configure task specific sets of bindings. This combined with extfs and custom menus makes it a great way to make a personal interface to non-file data sources too.

JNRowe

2 years agodiscuss

Just to muddy the waters some more there was also an EC variant¹ of the 030 without the MMU.

The EC variant was available right through to the 060, and I'd be curious to know how prevalent the line was. I suspect the EC versions far outnumbered the "full" chips, because they appeared in all kinds of industrial systems. I'm basing that entirely on working for a company that was still shipping products with MMU-less 68k and coldfire this century, not any real data.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68030#Variants

JNRowe

3 years agodiscuss

[I'm not recommending this, but maybe… No, no. I'm not sure…]

It isn't even just the newer shells that have solved this, zsh also has a solution out of the box¹. The extensive globbing support in zsh can largely replace `find`, and things like zargs allow you to reuse your common knowledge throughout the shell.

For example, performing your first example with zargs would use regular option separators(`--`), regular expansion(`{1..5}`), and standard shell constructs for the commands to execute.

I'll contrive up an example based around your file counter, but slightly different to show some other functionality.

    f() { fs=($1/*(.)); jo $1=$#fs }
    zargs -P 32 -n1 -- **/*(/) -- f

That should recursively list directories, counting only the files within each, and output² jsonl that can be further mangled within the shell². You could just as easily populate an associative array for further work, or $whatever. Unlike bash, zsh has reasonable behaviour around quoting and whitespace too.

Edit to add: I'm not suggesting zargs is a replacement for parallel, but if you're only using a small subset of its functionality then it may be able to replace that.

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...

² https://github.com/jpmens/jo

³ https://github.com/stedolan/jq

JNRowe

5 years agodiscuss

This is one of the many cool things that zsh comes with out of the box. It ships an autoload-able colors¹ script that does largely the same thing as your fragment, but you know it available wherever zsh is.

In much the same way it comes with both a termcap² and terminfo³ module, allowing you to easily avoid hardcoding system specific escapes in to your config.

¹ https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh/blob/master/Functions/Misc/...

² http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Zsh-Modules.html#The-...

³ http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Zsh-Modules.html#The-...

Submissions

Big loads offgrid with a small battery (sidelined)

Notes from the PipeWire Hackfest 2026

Using Fedora Silverblue for Compositor Development

The Mysterious XF86AudioPlay Issue

How does Flathub even work? The CDN and caching layer

GNOME GitLab Git traffic caching

Huion Devices in the Desktop Stack

Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges (2021)

Gnome OS Hackfest FOSDEM 2026

Best Practices for Ownership in GLib

Visualizing and managing Pipewire audio graphs from Emacs

Improving the Flatpak Graphics Drivers Situation

Pre-Tenuring in V8

EmacsConf 2025 Notes

Linux Kernel Version Numbers

Mutation Testing for Librsvg

DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian

An Ode to Org Babel

Think you can't interpose static binaries with LD_PRELOAD? Think again

OSC 3008: Hierarchical Context Signalling

comments