Another project where I’m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and there’s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but I’m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, I’m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And it’s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. 🥳

(Thank goodness, they turned it off for the weekend! So it’s only 24/5! Whoop, whoop.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s a long way to walk! 🤯

@bender@twtxt.net Naaah, I don’t have a dish washer either, it’ll be fine. 🤣 (No it won’t.)

My washing machine is making funny noises and I’m this 🤏 close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product that’s designed to break down in a couple of years.

Washing is easy anyway, the spin cycle to dry that stuff is the important part …

ChatGPT https://brynet.ca/chatgpt/

@shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe 🙋 with extra 24/7 noise from the construction site outside (construction guys live in a little “container” and they need power, so they have a diesel generator running 24/7)

Great article by Ploum about chatbots/AI and education: https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

@shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe 🤣

When people “make plans”, I always respond like this:

https://movq.de/v/9a8712846d/at-night.jpg

Finally found the clip where this is from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfDty810Kfc&t=65s

@prologic@twtxt.net Reminds me to have another look at LSP. Last time I checked, it was super messy in Vim. 🤔

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Python’s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really don’t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesn’t need type hints), but that’s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I don’t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. 😩

I have a love-hate relationship with Python’s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. I’m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage – or don’t use Python.)

@shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe Yeah, I avoided that issue as well. I moved everything on the website except for the twtxt stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The thing is that’s hard to avoid if TYPE_CHECKING, but documentation tools such as pdoc don’t support that … so it’s either type hints or API docs. 🤷

I hope I can eventually find a way out of this mess …

@javivf@adn.org.es Oh! Thanks, should be fixed now. 😊

Yikes. https://adamj.eu/tech/2021/05/13/python-type-hints-how-to-fix-circular-imports/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org All that short brown grass, almost looks like Scotland. 🤔 (I’ve never been there. 😅)

What the heck is 06.jpg?

@prologic@twtxt.net Changed the domain of my website (except for twtxt).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (At least I didn’t break all the links again. In late 2015, I switched from a PHP backend to the current static website, which changed just about everything. I hope doing a disruptive change like this one every 10 years is tolerable. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, right. Forgot about that. 🫤

Did it work? Am I still here? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I think I found an easy way to redirect anything except the twtxt stuff. That’s probably better. 🤔

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? 🤔🤯