So, are you guys up for an experiment?

I’m really not happy with the domain “uninformativ.de” anymore. I’m going to switch to “movq.de” soon (or maybe something else if I get another fancy idea).

If I keep the url = field in my twtxt file, nothing should break, right? Right? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Yup. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net gemini-cli, something something https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

I recently got an email with this byte sequence:

\xf0\x9f\x8e\x81\xf0\x9f\x95\xaf\xef\xb8\x8f

That’s U+1F381, U+1F56F, U+FE0F. The last one is a “variation selector”:

https://unicodeplus.com/U+FE0F

My toolkit renders this incorrectly – and so do tmux and GNU screen.

Unicode ain’t easy. 🥴

https://github.com/unix-v4-commentary/unix-v4-source-commentary

A comprehensive, line-by-line commentary on the UNIX Fourth Edition source code (released November 1973; tape recovered from June 1974 distribution).

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

@prologic@twtxt.net Damn, nice! I know exactly what you mean – the output/screenshot looks trivial, but there’s so much going on behind the scenes. 😃

Did you do the whole dance with BIOS boot and everything?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I sure hope that they generate these files from the general terminfo database instead of maintaining their own DB. 😳

@bender@twtxt.net I’m already using it for tracktivity (meant for tracking activities and events, like weather, food consumption, stuff like that), which is basically a somewhat-fancy CSV editor:

https://movq.de/v/f26eb836ee/s.png

I have a couple of other projects where I could use it, because they are plain curses at the moment. Like, one of them has an “edit box”, but you can’t enter Unicode, because it was too complicated. That would benefit from the framework.

Either way, it’s the most satisfying project in a long time and I’m learning a ton of stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Unix terminals are quite limited in that regard. 🫤 You know how Ctrl works? The XOR 0x40 thing? And Alt doesn’t exist at all, it’s just a prefixed ESC byte.

I was surprised to see curses knowing about “Shift+Tab”, wondering how that is supposed to work. Well, it’s an escape sequence, of course (depending on the terminal, of course).

Some work on the menu system to brighten my mood a little bit. No mouse support yet.

https://movq.de/v/932773e8c7/vid-1768500519.mp4

@prologic@twtxt.net Probably not, but thanks. 💚 It’ll get better.

@prologic@twtxt.net Work and the general state of (gestures broadly) everything.

Frustration level: Through the roof.

@bender@twtxt.net I vaguely remember this, some leftover from the old-style hashtags? The (#foo) stuff? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Never heard of either, tbh. 😳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Pep8 is deprecated, I think

Hmm, I don’t think it is, this still says “Status: Active”: https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/ 🤔

Since I used so much Rust during the holidays, I got totally used to rustfmt. I now use similar tools for Python (black and isort).

What have I been doing all these years?! I never want to format code manually again. 🤣😅

@shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe Hopefully, yes. Haven’t tried it yet.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe mckinley is back? Where? 🤔

Okay, I had heard of “River” before but I was not aware of this:

https://codeberg.org/river/river

River defers all window management policy to a separate window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. This includes window position/size, pointer/keyboard bindings, focus management, window decorations, desktop shell graphics, and more.

This sounds promising and it follows the old X11 model. River does all the nasty Wayland work and I can make just the WM? 🤔🤯

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, the lower right corner is different on purpose: It’s where you can click and drag to resize the window. https://movq.de/v/cbfc575ca6/vid-1767977198.mp4 Not sure how to make this easier to recognize. 🤔 (It’s the only corner where you can drag, btw.)

@bender@twtxt.net Seriously, if I ever get a CRT monitor again, I want it to be an amber one and then hook it up to some 8086. 😅 Only problem is that this stuff is expensive as hell now …

(The background and the window shadow are not amber and it wouldn’t have looked like that on a real monitor, unless you cranked up the brightness way too high.)

I think my widget toolkit will have an amber theme by default:

https://movq.de/v/22662db9b2/amber.png

My first PC had a monochrome amber screen and I just love looking at this. 😃

(It looks even better with redshift enabled, but I can’t screenshot that.)

Only downside is that there aren’t that many amber shades in the standard 256 color palette. Or well, maybe that’s actually a good thing, as it probably helps to keep the theme more minimal and less cluttered/noisy. 🤔

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe

Work kills the soul

Since most of the jobs that we do nowadays are simply meaningless: Yes. Work kills the soul.

Vacation: Doing crazy things like C on DOS, lots of Rust, bare-metal assembly code, everything is fine.

Back at work: How the fuck do I move an email in this web mail program? Am I stupid? 😮‍💨

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’ll let you guys know when/if it’s ready to get published. 😅 There are still rough edges and, obviously, very few widgets. Most importantly, a list view and a table widget are missing. But my vacation is over now, so things will crawl to a halt.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep! I like that this distillation metaphor makes it explicit: You have to go ahead and actually distill something. It doesn’t happen automatically. The metaphor acknowledges that this is work that needs to be done by someone.

“What is a PC compatible?” https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/what-is-a-pc-compatible/

I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about “simple” software:

https://oldbytes.space/@psf/115846939202097661

Distilled software.

I quote in full:

principles of software distillation:

Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size.

A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version.

A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works.

Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.

I often tried to tell people about “simple” or “minimalistic” software, “KISS”, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of “simple”. The term “simple” is too abstract.

This is worth thinking about some more. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yup, it’s been a while since I played that. 😅 Hardly rememberd it, to be honest. And apparently I did everything wrong, because that monster just came along and trashed my city, no way to stop it. 🤪

@bender@twtxt.net I am so prepared and ready for retirement. 🤣 (Not gonna happen for a while, though. If ever.)

@prologic@twtxt.net SimCity 2000 in DOSBox 😅

I just wanted to chill a bit, then this fucker came along and burned everything to the ground.

https://movq.de/v/993e81f9d7/sc2000.webp

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Not using OpenBSD or httpd? Yeah. It’s been working quite well since ~2017, so, meh, too lazy to switch now. But nothing is set in stone, of course.

@bender@twtxt.net I have another two days of vacation, then it’s back to the grindstone for me as well. 😢

Can’t we have vacation all year round? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Computers are great, eh? Soooo many problems to choose from! What do you want to solve today? 😅

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

Looks like someone loves Depth First Search.

https://movq.de/v/eece1bf16f/dfs.jpg

More widget system progress:

https://movq.de/v/87e2bce376/vid-1767467193.mp4

I like the oldschool shadow effect. 😅 Not sure if I’ll keep it, but it’s neat.

The menu bar is still fake.

Had to spend quite a bit of time optimizing the rendering today. This can get really slow really quickly.

Unicode is Pain.

I might be able to start porting my first program (currently uses urwid) soon. 🤔

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, probably. Not going down the CURRENT route, that’s for sure. 😅