At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

On my way to having windows and mouse support:

https://movq.de/v/95bbbbd3e8/basic-windows.mp4

It would be cool to have something like Turbo Vision eventually.

(I considered just using Turbo Vision, but it’s a C++ library and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. But it’s not yet completely off the table.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I haven’t spoken to a single person yet who was a fan of all this. Not even the more conservative family members.

Some people have detonated several really loud bombs yesterday. This wasn’t a “Böller”. It shook my walls, doors, windows. Family members in other parts of the country reported the same … Is this a new trend?

@javivf@adn.org.es Happy New Year! Let’s hope so. 😂

The only good thing about this absolute craziness is that I can restock my rocket sticks. I picked up twelve along the way. Unfortunately, it looks like 99.999% of ammunition is bombs instead of rockets. Some sections of my street look exactly like an arbitrary Pakistanian town that I’ve seen online.

There was surprisingly much snow in the woods. Also, all ponds have frozen over. I didn’t expect that. Not at all. There were even illegal ice skating tracks in the natural reserve. We came across a large puddle and it was at least 10cm solid ice to the ground. Crazy!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-01/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s actually not nearly as half bad as I really thought it would be. Just having to eventually deal with the “lowering down” to machine code / ARM64 assembly in the end once you’ve verified the semantics in the VM.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not bad for a start, ey! Looking forward to see you going down these rabbit holes and opening one can of worms after the other. :‘-D Very, very impressive, hats off to you. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org A “Hello World” binary is ~372KB in size. I currently have peephole optimization and deac code optimizations in play, and a few other performance related ones, but nothing too fancy. I have a test case that ensures fib(35) doesn’t regress too badly as I continue to evolve the language.

@prologic@twtxt.net Can you just make them optional? :-) But that of course complicates things.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s impressive. How large are the resulting binaries? You don’t have any optimizations in place yet, do you?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I hid in the workshop with earmuffs for the absolute worst part.

@javivf@adn.org.es Heck yeah, let’s do this! :-) Welcome to 2026.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not bad. 😃

@prologic@twtxt.net Anything by Charlotte de Witte. 😅 For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfkgSlmoe1I

Hmmm 🤔

Excluding merges, 1 author has pushed 171 commits to main and 175 commits to all branches. On main, 294 files have changed and there have been 52880 additions and 18269 deletions.

From the Mu (µ) Gitea Activity Tab

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Happy New Year to you too! 🥳

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is fuck’n great shit™ Where did you find this? 🤔 Got any more shit™ like this? 🙏

@dce@hashnix.club Happy New Year to you too! 🥳

@ionores@twtxt.net Very nice! 😊 Happy New Year to you too!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ooh, lovely! 🌇

I’m drowning the noise with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgivYC2s6hs

😅

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe We finally abandoned our GitLab. I publicly mirrored my code in the Mills Data Center a few days ago: https://git.mills.io/lyse/tt2

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Well, just a very limited subset thereof:

1. inline and multiline code blocks using single/double/triple backticks (but no code blocks with just indentation)
   
2. markdown links using using [text](url)
   
3. markdown media links using ![alt](url)
   

And that’s it. No bold, italics, lists, quotes, headlines, etc.

Just like mentions, plain URLs, markdown links and markdown media URLs are highlighted and available in the URLs View. They’re also colored differently, similarly to code segments.

I definitely should write some documentation and provide screenshots.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You actually have a Markdown parser/renderer in there? Oh dear. I would have been (well, I am) way too lazy for that. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Happy New Year 🥳🎆

It totally sounds like an active warzone around here. So, I just went on a very, very, very quick stroll to check out our sunset from ontop our hill (were all the bangs are way more horrible): https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-12-31/

Hurray, I finally fixed another rendering bug in tt that was bugging me for a long time. Previously, when there were empty lines in a markdown multiline code block, the background color of the code block had not been used for the empty lines. So, this then looked as if there were actually several code blocks instead of a single one.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/tt-bugfix-empty-lines-in-multiline-code-blocks.png

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Because they’re just boxes. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I see. Just crudely checked on my computer, with around 0.013 seconds, Python 2.7 seems a tad faster than Python 3.14’s 0.023 seconds in this little program.

The lazy imports sound not too bad, but I just skimmed over them. There are surprisingly many exceptions, but yeah, no way around them. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Mu (µ)’s startup latency appears to be ~10ms on my machine:

$ time ./bin/mu ./foo.mu 

real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.006s

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

That’s the problem with Python. If you have a couple of files to import, it will take time.

I want this to be reasonably fast on my old Intel NUC from 2016 (Celeron N3050 @ 1.60GHz) and I already notice that the program startup takes about 95 ms (or 125 ms when there are no .pyc files yet). That’s still fine, but it shows that I’ll have to be careful and keep this thing very small …

Python 3.14 will bring lazy imports, maybe that can help in some cases.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s cool! I also like the name of your library. :-) I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

@prologic@twtxt.net No, that’s Python/curses on Linux. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is this on yout little toy OS? 🤔

Well, you girls and guys are making cool things, and I have some progress to show as well. 😅

https://movq.de/v/c0408a80b1/movwin.mp4

Scrolling widgets appears to work now. This is (mostly) Unicode-aware: Note how emojis like “😅” are double-width “characters” and the widget system knows this. It doesn’t try to place a “😅” in a location where there’s only one cell available.

Same goes for that weird “ä” thingie, which is actually “a” followed by U+0308 (a combining diacritic). Python itself thinks of this as two “characters”, but they only occupy one cell on the screen. (Assuming your terminal supports this …)

This library does the heavy Unicode lifting: https://github.com/jquast/wcwidth (Take a look at its implementation to learn how horrible Unicode and human languages are.)

The program itself looks like this, it’s a proper widget hierarchy:

https://movq.de/v/1d155106e2/s.png

(There is no input handling yet, hence some things are hardwired for the moment.)

Btw, @shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe, that’s a super cool logo on your yarnd. I like it a lot!

It just doesn’t look aligned properly: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/misalignment.png Could be a yarnd issue, though, it might not expect a logo this large. Just wildguessing, no idea.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Because you might not want to commit all changed files in a single commit. I very often make use of this and create several commits. In fact, I like to git add --patch to interactively select which parts of a file go in the next commit. This happens most likely when refactoring during a feature implementation or bug fix. I couldn’t live without that anymore. :-)

If you have a much more organized way of working where this does not come up, you can just git commit --all to include all changed files in the next commit without git adding them first. But new files still have to be git added manually once.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Do we now need ad filters in twtxt clients, too? O_o I hope not! Personally, I cannot stand the “Sent with my crappy $phone/$app” e-mail footers.

But congrats on your client. :-)

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, they don’t truly support XDG. In fact, I looked in the Go stdlib source code to notice all the differences and shortcomings.

Ok, the standard library implementation is wonky at best, at least in regards to XDG, because it really doesn’t implement it properly. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/62382 I stick to my own code then. It doesn’t properly support anything else than Linux or Unixes that use XDG, but personally, I don’t care about them anyway. And the cross-platform situation is a giant mess. Unsurprisingly.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Cool, I didn’t know about os.UserConfigDir() up until a few seconds ago! I always implemented that myself.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll have a look at SnipMate. Currently, I’m (mis)using the abbreviation mechanism to expand a code snippet inplace, e.g.

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> testfunc func Test(t *testing.T) {<CR>}<ESC>k0wwi

or this monstrosity:

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> tabletest for _, tt := range []struct {<CR>    name string<CR><CR><BS>}{<CR>   {<CR>   name: "",<CR><BS>},<CR><BS>} {<CR>  t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {<CR><CR>})<CR><BS>}<ESC>9ki<TAB>

But this of course has the disadvantage that I still have to remove the last space or tab to trigger the expansion by hand again. It’s a bit annoying, but better than typing it out by hand.

Oh, suddenly Mother Hulda dumped a centimeter of snow tonight! https://lyse.isobeef.org/schnee-2025-12-30/01.jpg

Magpie from the day before yesterday: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-12-28/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I used SnipMate years ago (until 2012). IIRC, it’s more than just “insert a bit of text here”, it can also jump to the correct next location(s) and stuff like that. Don’t remember why I stopped using it.

Then I used nothing for a long time. Just before Christmas, I made my own plugin (… of course …), which does everything I need at the moment (and nothing more).

It can insert simple templates and then jump to the next location:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dpython.mp4

And replace a string after insertion:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dheader.mp4

(It’s not public (yet?) and it also uses vim9script, so I guess it wouldn’t work on your system.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Debugging this stuff on bare metal hardware (without an underlying OS) is a nightmare. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah. I had that in my Python implementation and was really missing that.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see. Yeah, all the Unicode stuff certainly doesn’t help here, that’s for sure.

Maybe “speedcurses” could be a name. Or just select any Palatinate curse. ;-)

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh yeah, I bet it is horrible to troubleshoot.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That sounds useful. 🤔

This was the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time, jesus. 🤣 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_(2022_film)