movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (9h ago)

(#2726vfq) st tries not to redraw immediately after new data arrives:

https://git.suckless.org/st/file/x.c.html#l1984

The exact timings are configurable.

This is the PR that changed the timing in VTE recently (2023):

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2678

There is a long discussion. It’s not a trivial problem, especially not in the context of GTK and multiple competing terminal widgets. st dodges all these issues (for various reasons).

#rvsbppq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (9h ago)

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

#2726vfq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (11h ago)

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

#2flem7q
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

We covered quite some ground in the two and a half hours today. The weather was nice, mostly cloudy and just 23°C. That’s also why we decided to take a longer tour. We saw four deer in the wild, three of which I managed to just ban on film, quality could be better, though. My camera produced a hell lot of defocused photos this time. Not sure what’s going on with the autofocus. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-07-10/

When the sun came out, colors were just beautiful:

#djz6opq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

(#i3mn6nq) @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That’s what I thought as well, sounds way too expensive to me. But I have no idea what the prices are over here. Probably also astronomical. Campers sit around most of the time, one really would need to use them a lot to justify spending so much money on them.

But yeah, each to their own (expensive) hobbies. :-) I, for example, burn my money on tools that I don’t really™ need. :-P

#7fh67iq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (3d ago)

(#l4jz2na) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

#xmkaa2a
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (3d ago)

(#cfv7cqa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

#hjzsu6q
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (3d ago)

(#cfv7cqa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it’s a shitshow. MS overconfirms all my prejudices constantly.

Ignoring e-mail after lunch works great, though. :-)

Our timetracking is offline for over a week because of reasons. The responsible bunglers are falling by the skin of their teeth: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/timetracking.png

  1. The error message neither includes the timeframe nor a link to an announcement article.
  2. The HTML page needs to download JS in order to display the fucking error message.
  3. Proper HTTP status codes are clearly only for big losers.
  4. Despite being down, heaps of resources are still fetched.

I find it really fascinating how one can screw up on so many levels. This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

#oishtya
prologic @twtxt.net
 (3d ago)

(#hdfz6xa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de This is a really good example of “simplicity” but achieves the intent and goals 👌

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I don’t use a screen reader fortunately (actually they’re pretty garbage). So all good 👍 (I juse use full-screen zoom).

#5dxphxa
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (3d ago)

(#hdfz6xa) @prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

  • The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  • There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  • Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  • The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  • It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  • They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.
#5xw4thq
prologic @twtxt.net
 (3d ago)

(#hdfz6xa) For example, I reckon software should treat stdout and stderr with care and never output logs or other such garbage to stdout that cannot possibly be useful in a UNIX pipeline 😅

#5nmncha
prologic @twtxt.net
 (3d ago)

(#hdfz6xa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah that’s why I’m striking this conversation with you 😅 Not only do I respect your opinion quite highly 🤣 But like you say (and I’ve read their philipshpy) it can be a bit “elitism” for sure. I’m genuinely interested in what we think of as software that “doesn’t suck”. Tb be honest I haven’t really put thought to paper myself, but I reckon if I did, I’d have some opinions/ideas…

#soz3bba
prologic @twtxt.net
 (4d ago)

(#cj4f2ya) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah for sure! The thing that annoys me about a lot of this, is the sheer fact you can’t really self-host let alone self-train these things I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms on a few tasks and training sets, but man it’s hard™ 🤣 I feel like we’re doing something wrong here…

#7gvbmra
prologic @twtxt.net
 (4d ago)

(#cj4f2ya) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This was an interesting read for sure! 👍 I don’t think it had anything I hadn’t already considered in terms of the ethical/moral points of view. I’m not sure where I stand myself either to be honest. I’ve forced myself to get familiar with the ecosystem and tooling, because in my line of work as a tech lead (staff engineer in sre) you don’t want to be that one guy that ya know 😉 Ethically/Morally though, I’m definitely with the sentiment of this post 😅 Much like the whole Crypto hype yaers back (if y’all remember?!) this is also one of the most energy hungry pieces of “tech” (if you can call it that?) in a while. Then there’s these other issues “stealing people’s work”, “reliance is causing humans to become cognitively weak and neural connections to shrink”, to name a few…

#z7qwquq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (6d ago)

(#7upqiiq) In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

#3w5osiq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (6d ago)

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

#7upqiiq