I’m trying to implement configurable key bindings in tt. Boy, is parsing the key names into tcell.EventKeys a horrible thing. This type consists of three information:

1. maybe a predefined compound key sequence, like Ctrl+A
   
2. maybe some modifiers, such as Shift, Ctrl, etc.
   
3. maybe a rune if neither modifiers are present nor a predefined compound key exists
   

It’s hardcoded usage results in code like this:

func (t *TreeView[T]) InputHandler() func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
    return t.WrapInputHandler(func(event *tcell.EventKey, setFocus func(p tview.Primitive)) {
        switch event.Key() {
        case tcell.KeyUp:
            t.moveUp()
        case tcell.KeyDown:
            t.moveDown()
        case tcell.KeyHome:
            t.moveTop()
        case tcell.KeyEnd:
            t.moveBottom()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlE:
            t.moveScrollOffsetDown()
        case tcell.KeyCtrlY:
            t.moveScrollOffsetUp()
        case tcell.KeyTab, tcell.KeyBacktab:
            if t.finished != nil {
                t.finished(event.Key())
            }
        case tcell.KeyRune:
            if event.Modifiers() == tcell.ModNone {
                switch event.Rune() {
                case 'k':
                    t.moveUp()
                case 'j':
                    t.moveDown()
                case 'g':
                    t.moveTop()
                case 'G':
                    t.moveBottom()
                }
            }
        }
    })
}

This data structure is just awful to handle and especially initialize in my opinion. Some compound tcell.Keys are mapped to human-readable names in tcell.KeyNames. However, these names always use - to join modifiers, e.g. resulting in Ctrl-A, whereas tcell.EventKey.Name() produces +-delimited strings, e.g. Ctrl+A. Gnaarf, why this asymmetry!? O_o

I just checked k9s and they’re extending tcell.KeyNames with their own tcell.Key definitions like crazy: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/master/internal/ui/key.go Then, they convert an original tcell.EventKey to tcell.Key: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/b53f3091ca2d9ab963913b0d5e59376aea3f3e51/internal/ui/app.go#L287 This must be used when actually handling keyboard input: https://github.com/derailed/k9s/blob/e55083ba271eed6fc4014674890f70c5ed6c70e0/internal/ui/tree.go#L101

This seems to be much nicer to use. However, I fear this will break eventually. And it’s more fragile in general, because it’s rather easy to forget the conversion or one can get confused whether a certain key at hand is now an original tcell.Key coming from the library or an “extended” one.

I will see if I can find some other programs that provide configurable tcell key bindings.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I meant the builtin module:

$ python3 -m pep8 file.py
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pep8.py:2123: UserWarning: 

pep8 has been renamed to pycodestyle (GitHub issue #466)
Use of the pep8 tool will be removed in a future release.
Please install and use `pycodestyle` instead.

  $ pip install pycodestyle
  $ pycodestyle ...

I can’t seem to remember the name pycodestyle for the life of me. Maybe that’s why I almost never use it.

@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/ 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I even got spam on ICQ, back when ICQ was a thing. I see spam as an innate thing. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net That’s what I like about Go, too. However, every now and then I really dislike the result, e.g. when removing spaces from a column layout. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I hate it.

I think I should have a look at Python formatters, too. Pep8 is deprecated, I think, it’s been some time that I looked at it.

@kiwu@twtxt.net what’s going on, Kiwu?

@kiwu@twtxt.net Oh? 🤔 What’s up? Can you share? Or just having a hrd time? 🤗

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Welcome to the dark side 🤣

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t think he is 🤔

@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? 🤔🤯

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Whoohoo! That’s a start to cross-platform support 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Aha! Well, happy hacking. A tiling window manager seems to be good fun. :-)

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe No email has arrived here? 🤔

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Okay I pushed a commit that hopefully fixes this. I hope!

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yes; however the interpreter is also platform dependent and relies on making raw syscalls. This is so the runtime semantics remain the same between the two execution modes.

I’ll see if I can add support for linux/amd64 and netbsd/amd64 for the VM at least.

@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).

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe if you don’t show me the actual full stacktrace, I can’t fix the problem 😢

Mu (µ) is coming along really nicely 🤣 Few things left to do (in order):

• Finish the concurrency support.
  
• Add support for sockets
  
• Add support for linux/amd64
  
• Rewrite the heap allocator
  
• Rewrite Mu (µ) in well umm Mu (µ) 😅
  

Here’s a screenshot showing off the builtin help():

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe the whole bridge idea is a mistake done twice (I encouraged the first time, it was a mistake to do so). In this case, the “Babel Tower” works; there is no need to interact with “others”, let it be just twtxt.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I see. Unfortunately, there seems to be no box drawing character for a corner with a diagonal line. Indeed, this is probably the best you can do.

Is the single character enough to hit it comfortably with the mouse, though? Maybe one additional to the left and above could be something to think about. Not sure. Of course this complicates it a bit more. Personally, I like fullscreen windows, so I’m definitely the wrong guy to judge this or even comment on. :-)

@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 …

Feeling nostalgic, for 3D-ish old game sprites, so I made one of myself.

implemented curl, grep, jq, head & tail in javascript for my website, zsh now knows the difference between hi;hi and "hi;hi", and a bunch of documentation has been written for all that, too! i do normal people things for fun :3

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice, it’s coming together!

Just in case you haven’t already noticed it, the right lower corner of the window in front was not updated when it received the focus. 8-) (In tt I also render focused text input fields with a doubly lined border, where unfocused ones have a single one.)

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.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe

Work kills the soul

it sure can! 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What’s Email?! 😂

@kiwu@twtxt.net better now, with you around! 🙈

@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/

@bender@twtxt.net They’re not completely impossible, but C makes it much easier to run into them. I think the key point is that in those “safe” languages, buffer overflows are caught and immediately crash the program (if not handled otherwise) instead of silently corrupting memory, not being noticed right away and maybe only later crashing at a different location, where it can be very hard to find the actual root cause. This is a big improvement in my book.

Some programmers are indeed horrible. I’m guilty myself. :-)

I like the article.

I came across this on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”, which I found interesting:

“There has lately been a lot of interest in “safe” programming languages like Rust or Go in which it is impossible, or is at least difficult, to make common programming errors like memory leaks or array overruns.”

If that’s true, then encountering those issues means the programmer is, simply, horrible?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I quite like this part:

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

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. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yiha! Even autoscroll, very nice! The naming certainly drew inspiration from Urwid. I like it. Looking forward to eventually checking out its inner workings. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Given the age, they must mean Kopernikus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFS_Kopernikus

@movq@www.uninformativ.de :-D

@bender@twtxt.net I also went back to my duty today and fixed a problem I created right before vanishing into the holidays. Of course, I discovered more problems while fixing the one thing. Luckily, another public holiday tomorrow. :-)

During my time off, I was a very lazy rat. I planned on doing some woodworking again, but instead I started watching Itchy Boot’s Africa season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMvfS5mbsiI&list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4UU-DirPQlX0ZP

@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 No, I had my break/holiday earlier. I chose to work through, except the public holidays of course.

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

@prologic@twtxt.net so, you were not giving time off during the end of year? The company you work for didn’t give a break?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hear hear! If anything, holiday breaks help to validate the fact that we are prepared for retirement. At least, I am!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ahh nice! It’s been several decades since I’ve played that! Probably 3 actually come to think of it 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net SimCity 2000 in DOSBox 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what game is that?