More widget system progress:

https://movq.de/v/87e2bce376/vid-1767467193.mp4

I like the oldschool shadow effect. 😅 Not sure if I’ll keep it, but it’s neat.

The menu bar is still fake.

Had to spend quite a bit of time optimizing the rendering today. This can get really slow really quickly.

Unicode is Pain.

I might be able to start porting my first program (currently uses urwid) soon. 🤔

(#vqu5wfq) @shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, probably. Not going down the CURRENT route, that’s for sure. 😅

(#vqu5wfq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s already fixed:

https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/668f1f05e71c5e979d278f1ad4568956226715ea

Question is when that fix will land. 😅

(#vqu5wfq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Bah. Yeah, that looks like a bug. Let’s see if this already reported upstream. 🤔

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/seniorin-stirbt-an-silvester-in-wuerzburg-region-ist-erschuettert

Finally Skyrim weather. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/aa2800e44c/IMG_20260102_090034.jpg

(#voi7gxa) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club

Steps to world domination:

1. “Invent” “AI” (by using other people’s data).
   
2. Get people hyped about it and ideally hooked on it.
   
3. Only provide it as a cloud service. But hey, if you want to, you can run it locally!
   
4. Buy all hardware available on the market, so that nobody but you can build more systems.
   
5. All PCs of consumers and competitors are too weak now and can’t be upgraded anymore.
   
6. Everybody depends on your cloud service! Win!
   

All of that is possible because corporations don’t have a “conscience” in capitalism. Nobody forces the RAM manufacturers to sell all their stuff to just one or two buyers, but since the only goal of that manufacturer is to make money, they do it.

(#ex5vwtq) 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.)

(#wap76wa) @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?

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

(#p43aoaq) @prologic@twtxt.net Not bad. 😃

(#zs4mzka) @prologic@twtxt.net Anything by Charlotte de Witte. 😅 For example:

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

(#zs4mzka) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ooh, lovely! 🌇

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

(#5pjhgha) @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. 😅

(#fdx5m6a) @prologic@twtxt.net Happy New Year 🥳🎆

Why have these Unicode smilies never caught on, I wonder? 🤪

𜲦𜲩 𜲨𜲩 𜲦𜲧
𜲪𜲫 𜲮𜲯 𜲰𜲱

(#2p27wba) The baseline here is about 55 ms for nothing, btw. Python ain’t fast to start up.

$ time python -c 'exit(0)'

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.007s

(#2p27wba) @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.

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

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.)

(#xwn45gq) @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.)

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

(#sd722yq) @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)

(#j5s5khq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

(#7tsxwnq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Bwahaha. 🤣

Trying to come up with a name for a new project and every name is already taken. 🤣 The internet is full!

(#kaiqxgq) @prologic@twtxt.net This is a really cool project, that’s for sure. 👌

(#p4hxpnq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I was about to write “it really is worse where you live”, then I heard the first bang out on the street. 🤣

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/

(#gslvc3q) @prologic@twtxt.net Oh! 🤔

(#gslvc3q) @prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃

(#gslvc3q) Seeing this run on real hardware is so satisfying, even if it’s just a small example. 😅

https://movq.de/v/ec46b8cf99/netbook.mp4

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

In case you haven’t seen it yet:

Matt Godbolt’s “Advent of Compiler Optimisations”!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2HVqYf7If8cY4wLk7JUQ2f0JXY_xMQm2

(#axubhsq) @prologic@twtxt.net And I froze my ass off yesterday at -5°C and strong winds. 🤣