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 ā€œextendedā€ one.

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


#sczoyta

(#2puspya) @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.


#2jboz4q

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. šŸ¤£šŸ˜…


#pebgp3a

Okay, I had heard of ā€œRiverā€ 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? šŸ¤”šŸ¤Æ


#74u6qdq

It drizzled all morning when we picked up the old christmas trees in town with the scouts. Right after lunch the snow storm suddenly hit and dumped three centimeters of snow in just 15 minutes. I cycled home in these crazy conditions, freezing rain hammered my face. As soon as I arrived, it stopped. It’s now down to drizzling again.

All my soaked gear is now hung up to dry. The next 11 months, I’m going to find needles over needles in all kind of impossible places.


#s2hgrfa

(#g34eztq) @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. šŸ˜… 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 ā€œkeyboard firstā€ 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 ā€œWindowsā€ for popups or a multi-window view (with the ā€œWindowManagerā€ being a tiny little tiling WM).


#wulnloq

(#q33dfjq) Most of it should work on other platforms, the bytecode VM that is. You may run into some platform quirks though that rely on syscall() – Let me know what you run into and I’ll try to fix them nw. The problem right now is I haven’t even begun to start work on another platform/architecture yet.


#y5s2uvq

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) šŸ˜…

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


#q33dfjq

(#g34eztq) @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. :-)


#pjdqhsq

(#javxoxa) @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. šŸ¤” (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. šŸ˜… Only problem is that this stuff is expensive as hell now …


#g34eztq

(#javxoxa) @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.)


#lvokaxa

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. šŸ¤”


#javxoxa

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? šŸ˜®ā€šŸ’Ø


#ubuezaa

(#izdrxgq) @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 ā€œsafeā€ 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.


#ogc6jxq

I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about ā€œsimpleā€ 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 ā€œsimpleā€ or ā€œminimalisticā€ software, ā€œKISSā€, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of ā€œsimpleā€. The term ā€œsimpleā€ is too abstract.

This is worth thinking about some more. šŸ¤”


#533m7aa