Oh, if they’re concave they look great. Those teeth look like an excuse for cops to shoot you, but after grinding those off it looks perfect: more manageable and probably cheaper than a riot shield.

Maybe a perfect tool for protests!

Niri is interesting. It has a configuration file, and the config file is in yet another fairly complex config language: not toml, not yaml, not ini, not json. That’s something I’m avoiding.

It’s a novel and interesting approach.

It’s unique only in the combination of features.

• No configuration file, at all. When hlwm starts, it runs ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/herbstluftwm/autostart, which can be anything but it’s usually a shell script making a lot of calls to herstclient which do all of the configuration. So there’s no configuration syntax, and all WM configuration and control can be done exactly the same on the command line. No exceptions. bspwm does the same; I think niri and river on Wayland do this, too
• It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen.
• It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions. This is one area bspwm fails, although I grant this is subjective.
• It’s stable.
• It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory.
• It supports

It’s that hlwm has them all. Very subjectively, I find the client syntax to be intuitive, rich, and full featured. It has good and consistent monitor detection. It has a variety of common built-in layout, but custom layouts are easily scripted with bash (or anything that can call the client). It has an event listening model, for writing layouts, or anything else you might want to do - again, the interface to this is a command line client. I find not having bespoke languages, non-Turing-complete configs, or being forced into a specific language is increasingly important to me for things I rarely, but deeply when I do - change.

It does build-in hotkey configuration (via the command line), unlike bspwm which farms this out to something like sxhkd. There’s nothing forcing you to use the built-in hotkey management, and in fact when I first switched I from bspwm I used sxhkd. Doing it within hlwm did have the advantage of eliminating yet another configuration file (for sxhkd), and made hotkey configuration just another purely command-line operation. No multistep edit & reloading. When you have CLI-first, you can make changes without worrying that you’ll screw something up that prevents a clean reboot. You make changes, test then, and then if you like it you make a permanent change to autostart (or some subscript).

This is orthogonal to how I manage firewalls: I always make manual changes with nft on the cli and IFF everything works after extensive testing, then I persist the changes to the /etc/nftables.conf.

There are many tiling WMs, but far fewer that make command line C&C fully competent in all ways. It narrows down field considerably.

bspwm is a close second, but I have trouble with the bspwm tree model, and especially how monitors and tags are represented. There are also some extremely caustic prominent members of the bspwm community. But, really, it’s the model weirdness that had me switch.

River seems to be the closest in model, C&C, and capabilities to hlwm, and is probably where I’ll end up. I need to confirm that all of the DPI issues I last had with Wayland a few months ago are fixed, and that everything I need runs, and that I’m not adding a ton of overhead to run common things (extra layers, emulators, whatever). The gap between “can” and “does well”; between “possible” and “efficient” has IME been a Wayland weakness.

TL;DR: for features and idiom, on X bspwm has fair overlap with hlwm. For Wayland, River seems to be a good alternative.

Edit: Niri commentary removed; it does have configuration files, and they’re in kdl.

It’s an interesting system; it does clutter your workspace with a lot of files, especially if you have a lot of rules. I use it in one project and came away with mixed feelings.

Lots of good, some noise.

No, I didn’t. I don’t use Pis, I have ODroids. Heck, they may sell batteries for ODroids, too.

For me, it wouldn’t have made much difference because I have UPSes around the house serving things like routers, modems, and switches. And I do care about size and energy use. I’m only saying there are advantages to using laptops.

You can get little integrated LCD cases for Pis too, can’t you? And maybe even a little fold-out keyboard. Congratulations! You’ve re-invented the laptop!

B/c cigars?

Cigarette smoke is far more noxious than cigars or pipes. Pure burned tobacco just mostly smells like fragrant smoke. Cigarettes smell foul because the pre-packaged ones are full of chemicals.

Buh-bye Gnome.

To each their own! I do like summaries when it can be summarized. A great many can; videos of someone chronicling their experience flying across country in an ultra-light? Video. Someone listing top 10 whisks? Text.

That’s my preference, but I get you: some people would prefer to watch than read.

I wasn’t arguing that cycling wasn’t superior for many reasons, only that I didn’t like that they didn’t quote the specific statistic supporting the claim that cycling was better than walking. I do notice they left out jogging.

Someone else pointed out that there is a graphic in the article that shows cycling>walking; a graphic you don’t see if you view websites in text-only mode. I’d have liked to see the supporting statistic in accessibility-friendly text, and not hidden in a graphic, but it is there.

Dunno, but good theory. The other theory someone suggested that makes sense is that it’s spoken shorthand, like “I like 3-5 beer” was written “3/5”. Mist people would probably pronounce “3.5” as three-point-five, so writing it 3/5 does make sense.

Fair, fair. Although, some of us also believe that Palestine has a right to exist as a sovereign state, same as Israel. That goes beyond anti-genocide.

At least!

I can’t wait for whatever replaces TikTok, and the next generation starts calling TikTok’ers “boomers.”

I low-key love how “boomer” came to mean “anyone older than me.”

Gosh, yes, love that site. I don’t use it much since it’s almost impossible for it to stay comprehensive; for example, it’s missing both the Piantor and Piantor Pro, and the Piantor had been around for a couple years at least.

It is a wonderful tool, though. I think it’d be a full time job to keep it current with all commercially available keyboards, much less all of the bespoke builds.

Wow. That’s… that’s quite something, there. Yup.

Haha! Yeah, my bad. I read most articles in text mode; I didn’t see the graphic until I turned that off.

Hah! I’m having trouble distinguishing between the Cantor and the Piantor Pro, which is what I’m currently using.

My issue with these is the thumb key placement. The innermost two are fine, but having to tuck my thumb almost into my palm to reach those outer (looking at the keyboards, or inner, if you look at each hand) keys is not very ergonomic for me. It’s also a fairly wide horizontal span to move the thumb, and sequences requiring inner:outer are both tedious and unavoidable.

I don’t doubt you like it; for me it’s not ideal.

Thanks for the suggestion!!

Every day?

• Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
  • It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
  • It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
  • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
  • It’s stable
  • It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
• Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
• Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
• Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.

I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.

Look at that fat, sloppy fucker. He never served his county.