@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @klaxzy@klaxzy.net @david@daiwei.me I’m in a similar boat, they pushed us to use it, then pushed us to keep our usage below a certain threshold (although they do allow certain “power users” go beyond the limit, LOL). I dragged my feet at first, but they finally broke my spirit about a month before the limits were put into place. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing more managing than coding lately, so I mostly just use it for creating JIRA tickets (I find it to be very good at producing “Agile artifacts”).

@david@daiwei.me It’s somewhat expected to have a fair bit of Assembly (machine code) to get some of the bits you need going. But I think I can reduce this a bit. Let’s see…

I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo tired of “fast-moving” software. ruff changed a ton of stuff and now all my code bases “need fixing”. Blah.

And SemVer is worth nothing if your 4 year old program with over 16’000 commits is still at “version 0.x”. Blah!

Everything is horrible.

@prologic@twtxt.net This was to be expected and I’m glad that it’s finally happening. I seriously hope that AI/LLM output gets swamped with advertisements or unwanted code, so people see what they have gotten themselves into, especially the “vibe coders”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Similar to my Go IDE at work. GoLand hangs so often in this giant code base. :-D (But it could also be one or the other snake oil that’s forcefully installed and fucks with me every day.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Finally, your software is just perfect and finished by now, no need to report non-existing bugs or send in code changes. :-) How many tickets and merge requests did you get before moving to your own server?

I have to admit that I use git format-patch so rarely, I always have to pull it up from my shell history. Haven’t used git send-email even once. I definitely have to look into that soon. Wanted to do that for several years. I typically upload the patch to my server and send a link via IRC.

Maybe I was just very unlucky, but my experience is that you can perfectly ignore people and their work who only do it for the “fame”. It’s almost always been from inferior quality to say the least.

Why is there no English version of this interesting ZIP code article!? https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H0H_0H0 (Canadians know that this is Santa’s postal code.) https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/our-company/write-letter-to-santa.page

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmmm, I have no idea how to solve that problem. 😅 Some jenny stuff aside, I received zero bug reports or code contributions since leaving GitHub in 2018.

I thought I had made that super easy, because you can just send me an email – no sign-up process, nothing. But that’s way too old-school, people don’t know how to use git format-patch (let alone git send-email) and they also don’t understand that they can just send me a link to their forked Git repo (which can be hosted anywhere). Git is super flexible and powerful, but those features are hardly ever used.

Maybe people even need some kind “reward”, or “fame”. Like those “achievements” that you can unlock on GitHub. (Something to put in their CV … ?)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Works good. I fully get and support your reasoning behind that change. There’s only one downside. Quickly looking at some code snippets in the browser helps me to quickly judge whether it’s worth to clone a repo or not. Oh well. :-) After all I know that movqware always is.

On that note, I just finished writing the linux/risc64 backend and it only took ~2k lines of code 🎉

After many months of hard™ work, I’ve finally been able to get Mu (µ) lang to a point where the duplication of machine code / assembly between the ARM64/AMD64 and Mach-O and ELF formats are not all eliminated. This now means that writing a new backend target os/arch for Mu is now relatively simple to do, or far less duplicated work/effort.

Okay, so, my website also includes my code / git repos, and those are made browsable by stagit. What I don’t like about this (these days) is that this includes all the diffs of my commits. In other words: All my code.

This makes it super easy for malicious crawlers to slurp up valuable data. I don’t like that.

I’m thinking about switching to this instead:

https://movq.de/git2/

It still shows project infos and there are Atom feeds, but to get the code, you have to actually clone the repos.

🤔

(If you spot any bugs, let me know.)

and @david@daiwei.me your rename shipped 🙌 it’s “Generate recovery code” now (you were right — mints a fresh one each press), + it asks before replacing an existing code so you don’t nuke the one you saved 😅

quick correction on that cleanup timing 🙏 it’s not 28 days. nothing gets deleted for the first 30 days at all (observe-only), and after that only setups unused for ~6 months that also never saved a recovery code. saved a code = safe forever 👍

IMPORTANT: Treat the re oery code like a password.

📣 ACTION REQUIRED: Hey folks 👋 For those of you whom are using the Twtxt App either via the Hosted option or on your own twtd instnace or via Github/Gitea or any other publishing backend (doesn’t amtter). Please read.

Please open the app and you should be prompted to save your recovery code for your device. This basically is all of your settings, follows, etc in the app itself. This is synced to the Origin everytime you make a change, and also stored on-device. This is what makes it possible to sync your setting across services, move to another device, etc.

Please save a copy of the recovery code somewhere. This is only your only way to recover your settings.

Thank you 🙏

@david@daiwei.me Not sure if you only mean the code segments or in general. In theory, a general darker text color for read messages would probably work. The thing is that regular white on black is quite standard. In Newsboat, new articles are red (I opted for yellow here) and read ones white. I found that useful and kinda copied it for tt.

As an alternative, I also gave a much simpler teal on gray with reversed colors on focus a shot. Hmm, not so sure either. :-?

Unread messages:

Read messages:

Unread messages are yellow, while read messages are white in tt. Focusing them just alternates the fore- and background colors. With the old color scheme, I disliked that inline code and code blocks were basically just the opposite of normal text. Hence, unread code was white and read code yellow. I found this often confusing, especially with larger code blocks. Sure, there are the timestamp and author columns that still show the usual white (read) and yellow (unread) background for selected messages, but still.

This is how it was before with unread messages:

Before with read messages:

So, I just reworked the code styles. Not sure if I like that or if it is actually an improvement. Unread code is teal on gray when not in focus and becomes blue on orange when focused. I thought the dark gray code background on a black regular background is still nice and subtle. The same similarity in colors for focused messages meant to go with an orange code background on a yellow regular background. The teal was too light, so went with a blue foreground color:

When read and unfocused, the new color scheme calls for the same code style teal on dark gray. However, with white as the main background for selected messages, I went with a light gray code background and a blue code foreground. Again, the contrast with white and teal wasn’t good enough. Vice versa, blue on dark gray is also not all that readable:

It looks like a parrot. Let’s see if I begin to like it.

I’ve been coding again, and this time it might actually be useful to other people! https://codeberg.org/hellfire103/golden-retriever

I trip over this in our code at work all the time.

Python has this concept of “properties”:

class Oink:
    def __init__(self):
        self._foo = 3

    @property
    def my_property(self):
        return self._foo


a = Oink()
print(a.my_property)

my_property() is a method but it can be used as if it were a field.

This can also be used to define a setter:

class Oink:
    def __init__(self):
        self._foo = 3

    @property
    def my_property(self):
        return self._foo

    @my_property.setter
    def my_property(self, value):
        self._foo = 123 * value

Because, for some reason, Python people don’t like getters and setters. Instead, they hide it behind a property.

The result is, when you read this:

a.my_property = 5
print(a.my_property)

You have no idea that this actually calls a method.

I really think I should go back to Java.

Writing programs in Python is so exhausting. I want a compiler and I want static typing. No, linters and type checkers and IDEs are not good enough. Compilers catch way more errors in advance.

Rust is also exhausting. They’re constantly adding language features and, at the same time, the runtime library remains tiny and you need 3rd party libraries for everything. Many of those are still at version 0.x (SemVer!) and you can’t rely on anything. Often times, you need the latest Rust nightly compiler.

Go is … I don’t like it. And huge binaries.

I like C as a language, but it’s too fragile. I want to have a proper HashMap every now and then.

None of the above have good GUI libraries, at least not on Linux.

And then there’s Java. This is my fractal renderer that I wrote over 17 years ago:

https://movq.de/v/fcd3c4e557/vid-1784121825.mp4

It’s fast. It has a GUI with custom widgets and those weren’t even hard to make. It still works without changing a single line of code. The source code files have timestamps from 2009 and I just noticed that the JAR file I’m using in the video was compiled in 2010.

Java as a language is relatively easy to learn and to master. There are few surprises. The source code organization with packages is good. Java API docs are clear and well written.

The JVM ramp-up times have improved considerably:

https://movq.de/v/e7314e521e/vid-1784121998.mp4

This isn’t like the Dark Ages anymore. Might even be usable for some CLI tools.

The only thing where Java really sucks is anything close-ish to the kernel. Try issuing an ioctl() … I couldn’t have made my TUI framework in Java, but then again, I wouldn’t have needed to because Swing already exists and it just works.

@david@collantes.us heads up 👋 that verification code never reached you — outbound email was broken on my end (my mail relay was rejecting twtxt.net senders 🤦‍♂️). Fixed + deployed now 🥳 give the hosted feed another go, it’ll land this time 🤞

Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU | Hacker News Fark’n hell, this is some ~50k SLOC of Rust code compared to the original ~8k SLOC of C of the original this was based off of. No doubt this was “vibe coded” for sure, there is no way a human can write 50k SLOC, not in a reasonable timeframe anyway 😅

@david@daiwei.me Ta, I continued my fun with studying the tcell and cbind code bases for key bindings. My plan is to eventually not only support custom key bindings in the tt configuration file, but also to enable multi-key sequences, such as gg to jump to the top of a list/tree. Or use other vim-like navigation movements like 7j or 25gg etc.

And it turns out there are only a hand full oft tcell/cbind version combinations that work together. Only if all stars align, there’s chance of success. I will probably end up pulling cbind in to simplify my life. There are situations where tcell.EventKey’s triple of key, modifiers and rune are not all that intuitive to me. Let’s see.

Welcome to the fuck off ai code movement. http://txtpunk.com/foac

Anyone using XMPP? I’ve been hearing a lot about how it is the OG messaging protocol. That G00gle Talk used to use it as a back-end, that FB messanger and w_hatsapp use some modified version of it or something; And that setting up a server (or even using a public one) would be a better alternative to the aforementioned apps, so I did. Now the question is: “Where the Fu__ are my video calls at!!? 🤣” … The protocol supports videoconferencing and I’m yet to find a decent Desktop/Mobile client that implements it. I wish I knew enough Code-Fu to contribute/help implement some, somewhere.

Java 1.3 on Windows 95 with Proton as the editor could be another option for next Advent of Code.

Win95 runs pretty smoothly on my old box (no surprise, that box came with Win95) and I like Java, so … why not …

Not sure about the speed, though. 🥴

I just read @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s blog post over here:

https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/articles/learning-to-code-like-it-s-the-90s

Jesus, it must be so overwhelming for young people to get started with programming.

When I started programming, there was the built-in ROM BASIC of that PC and probably a bit of BASIC on a floppy, and that was it. Nowadays? Millions of libraries and frameworks and languages and what not – and, much worse, there’s the expectation that you need to make something fancy. When I started, printing something and understanding IF was good enough.

I now decided to include the alternatives: https://lyse.isobeef.org/code-readability/#alternative-timestamp-formattings

If Claude Code tells me one more fucking time ‘Fair point’ to a request I am going to loose my shit!

For people who say AI is making us dumber, I disagree. I’ve learned more about coding in three months than the past 10 years.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Sometimes, views on quality code are 180° apart.

Here we are, it took me a bit longer: https://lyse.isobeef.org/code-readability/

I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions

Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).

I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …

My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.

Gah!

The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)

Oh come on! Why such a stupid anti-feature!?

WARNING: Your yt-dlp version (2026.03.17) is older than 90 days!

     It is strongly recommended to always use the latest version.
     You cannot update when running from source code; Use git to pull the latest changes.
     To suppress this warning, add --no-update to your command/config.

In the light of current events, I will first consult my pillow and only then write an article about readable code.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes. The author tries hard not to break existing code, but apparently he did this time. In his defense, it’s not an official release, I just updated to master. Which is exactly what I always did in the past as there are no real versions (I even think that in one ticket he wrote years ago that master is always stable). That has finally changed a year ago, though: https://github.com/rivo/tview/releases/tag/v0.42.0

Fuck me! I tried to upgrade tview and the first thing I notice is a shitload of added dependency versions:

go.mod | 18 ++++-----
go.sum | 97 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------

My code does not compile anymore as the view.FormItem interface was extended. Get/SetDisabled(…) are quickly implemented, no worries.

But the tview.Primitive (what makes a widget) interface has now a bunch of PRIVATE methods. For focus handling. Would you believe that!? Thanks, I cannot satisfy this interface in my very custom widgets anymore. Okay then, I just embed *tview.Box. tt now successfully compiles, but does not react anymore on key presses and the message tree is not focused either.

I’m not in the mood to debug this shit. :-( Lunch time.

Getting the vim key bindings to work for focus switching in this modal dialog took me forever. Only cursors and (Shift+)Tab are supported out of the box. I absolutely understand that, it’s fine. I installed an input handler on the dialog, but the focus always stayed the same.

After two wasted hours, I was in despair to copy the tview.Modal into my own code base. Of course, I had to fix all the private tview field accesses first. But even installing the input handler directly on the buttons themselves did not work. Even though, the handler was definitely executed, the focus did not shift. Forcing redraws as a last resort also did not work.

Looking through all the messy chained input handling, I eventually stumbled across another place in the tview.Form, which is internally used by tview.Modal. This messed around with app focus receptions and input handlers. This gave me the idea to make the tview.Application refocus my modal dialog after I told the modal dialog which button to select. And would you look at that, this did the trick! I haven’t completely figured out what is going on exactly, but I could get rid of my Modal clone again.

I always go through hell with focus handling in tview. Each and every time. It just does not feel natural to me. Complete brainfuck to wrap my head around. The Urwid API felt sooo much more refined, it never was an issue. It just works. In fact, I cannot think of any other TUI library that has remotely the same pain level when it comes to focusing widgets as tview.

Now I’m curious how movwin deals with that. ;-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks!

On the AI changelog part, though, I’d rather recommend to just not have a changelog at all.

I’m afraid that ship has sailed. You can rest assured that someone who uses AI/LLMs for their code (which is almost everybody at this point) will most certainly also use it for changelogs.

I actually considered not mentioning AI output at all, because this just opens a huge can of worms … 😞

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these “New Project Contributors” sections

Yeah, they play on a nerd’s pride.

Now, it’s just the same auto shitshow with MR titles in a rolling date-versioned release scheme. It’s just our team who has to deal with that, though. I think I’m the only one who is not a fan of it.

I’ve found that this whole situation is much worse at work than it is in the Free Software world. At work, it’s literally work and hardly anybody actually cares. We still don’t have all people convinced that writing good commit messages or using good branch names is worth the time. It’s … oh god, no, I’m going to stop here, this is bad for my mental health. 😅

Suffice it to say, all release notes at work are now AI-generated. Nobody gives a fuck.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That is really cool! Maybe it would look nicer if the selected entry highlighted the whole row, not just the individual cells in that row without the column spacers. :-? But maybe I’m wrong. Everyone has their own taste.

And no, it’s not pointless at all. I find this really interesting. The videos and photos are perfect for me. Even if I had the source code, I would not use that toolkit, as I’m not a fan of movable windows in TUIs. I want all my own programs to be fullscreen all the time. 8-) Having said that, it’s still an absolutely brilliant source of inspriation that will come in handy one day. So, keep posting. :-)

(I know it’s kind of pointless to post all this stuff if the source code isn’t available, but meh, whatever. 🤪)

Taking a break from coding and dev projects today and spend it organizing my 14,000 song music library I self-host with Navidrome

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Great to be asked for feedback! I just noticed that the first wcwidth version was derived from Markus Kuhn’s C code. I came across him in my ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 endeavors the other day. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html What a surprise. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Two emails. 😅 One person asking for the source code, and the author of wcwidth (the library I’m using) contacted me to provide some input. 👌

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That DORA quote is 🤯 — and it perfectly explains why AI coding tools terrify me in certain contexts. Dropping Copilot into a codebase full of technical debt isn’t gonna fix the debt, it’s just gonna write more of it faster 🤣 Fred Brooks would be nodding his head right now 🙏

(#xbh2sbq) @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That DORA quote is 🤯 — and it perfectly explains why AI coding tools terrify me in certain contexts. Dropping Copilot into a codebase full of technical debt isn’t gonna fix the debt, it’s just gonna write more of it faster 🤣 Fred Brooks would be nodding his head right now 🙏

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, I’m sorry to hear about that. Permanent emergency mode sucks, I’ve been there, and it always felt like drowning.

Fortunately, at my current job, we’ve been given time to keep our technical debt from overtaking the project. Unfortunately, we’ve been forced to use AI (mostly in the form of GitHub Copilot). Of course, now that the tokens cost more than a developer’s salary, they’ve been rethinking that position somewhat. 😁

In my experience, you are 100% correct - even in the best case, AI is a force multiplier. If the code is clean, it can speed you up. But if the code is a mess, it’ll just multiply the mess.

@prologic@twtxt.net As have I. 🤔 I mean, since I left GitHub, I got basically 0 pull requests anyway.

Even during my time using GitHub, I noticed that “drive-by PRs” are rarely a good idea. People don’t really know/understand the code or the design principles/goals, so I often turned down PRs. Or I accepted them and was grumpy afterwards. 😅

What does work is having a team of maintainers/devs. The only question is: How do you build such a team if you don’t accept PRs? That’s going to be the interesting part.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: “Naah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.” 😅 And indeed … ha.

Oh god, yeah, that’s a lot of <span>. 🤔 Can’t really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

In parts. I write everything in Markdown (it’s online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like “re-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html file” and that’s mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. 🤔