stochastictrebuchet

Locally sourced and by free-range developers

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Any time I read the Kitty docs I’m just in awe of everything its maker, Kovid Goyal, has built for it. Like, not just individual features but entire protocols, which other terminals then adopt.

I just wish remote session persistence was more of a priority. Goyal dislikes tmux (to put it mildly) but doesn’t suggest an alternative to those who do their work on remote servers. If I’m already organizing my work in tmux over ssh, I might as well do the same locally as well – which unfortunately means missing out on some of Kitty’s best parts.

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!

Another happy Kitty user here!

I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.

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Another vote for hx!

Getting a productive setup for Python work is a matter of a few extra lines of TOML. The pre-release version on master also allows for multiple LSPs per language, which means I can combine pyright with ruff.

The modal key chords are verb-object instead of object-verb. It’s not a main selling point to me. However, you get multi-cursors out of the box, which I’ve always found simpler than e.g. macros. In general, keybindings are discoverable. I learn something new every week.

All in all, despite a few rough edges, it’s a nice alternative to needing to get a PhD in neovim configuration to get anywhere remotely near the cool setups other people are rocking.

All my old macbooks eventually get the Linux treatment. On modern hardware, however, the trade-offs of non-macOS just don’t make sense to me.

For now, Apple Silicon has made a fanboy out of me. I can’t overstate how big the jump in performance felt going from intel to my first M1 – not to mention the improved thermals. And obviously part of that is due to excellent alignment between hardware and software.

Still, once that first M1 hits retirement, I’ll no doubt experience that familiar pang of gratitude towards those engineers that put up with the trade-offs of running Linux on it today in order to get everything working.