wwwgem

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Thanks for the feedback. I'm used to packer but it's not maintained anymore so may be a good time to switch to lazy.
I'll see if I can have it work in NixOS.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

It worked. Thanks!
Just a question though: why is there instructions and all the packages in NixOS if it's not yet reliable?

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Thanks for this feedback, it helps me feel a little bit less stupid :) With everything setup in NixOS documentation for neovim in appearance I thought really dumb to not be able to have it worked.

Using the approach proposed by @flashgnash (i.e. using lazy.vim) let me install neovim and all my plugins.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Thank you for your help. I ended up using the approach proposed by @flashgnash (i.e. using lazy.vim) which let me install neovim and all my plugins.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Thanks very much. That's exactly what I needed. I'm still not used to the diversity of NixOS documentation and was not aware of this one.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Thanks! I'm still not used to the diversity of all the NixOS documentarian and was not aware that arbitrary options can be found there.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Just realized that I had this line in my config already but the change was not applied until I reboot. 😳

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

As I said I've actually done it before asking... But I didn't reboot and and that was needed for the change to take effect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wwwgem , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Always nice to read so great posts. Welcome to a brand new world of possibilities. I promise your journey will be long but full of self accomplishments, learnings, satisfaction. You will probably run into one or two times when you'll have to search for a solution but in these situations the Linux community will always be there for you and you'll feel so proud to have learn something along the way.

You realize how much Linux is different to other OS only when you live with it. There's a real philosophy, it's not just some branding wording. If you feel adventurous enough you'll certainly see your mindset and way of thinking evolving as time goes. You have so much possibilities to discover, I'm jealous of this sentiment of new user you'll experience. I've personaly used to tweak Windows back in the days and its limitations (amongst other things) is one of the main reasons why I switched to Linux. Twenty years later I'm wondering how I didn't know earlier that another world existed.

Beyond the fact that Linux has improved my workflow drastically compared to my Windows/MacOS colleagues, it also helped me grow intellectually. The best part is that it never ends because there's always a new tool, app, distro to experiment, play with, and learn from.

Working with a system and not adapting to it or fighting against it is a huge difference. Linux has so many options that you can litterally build the system that fits your specific needs and liking to perfection (and even better than you can think now). It's just a matter of few efforts. We're not used to make efforts nowadays and prefer opting for the laziness of being the slaves of a system/brand but I can guarantee you will be rewarded for these efforts beyond your expectations.

Enjoy your new life!

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Drivers is a vocabulary you should almost forgot in Linux ;) Contrary to other OS, Linux will rarely require you to install a driver.

To answer your question, doing a simple online "mint wireless 8275" returned a forum with your exact issue. The reported solution is to "try powering it off, remove the power cord and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Reconnect cord and power up". As weird as it sounds this may work. It worked for me 10 years ago with a keyboard. It's easy and quick to try it. Let us know if that helps or not. Too bad you didn't like Arch because your laptop was fully supported.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Right, nobody said it's never needed (but it should be rare, especially for WiFi). What's weird is that on this item link itself it's stated that "Linux drivers are part of the upstream Linux kernel." And from the table there the driver should be available unless you're running a pretty old kernel.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Oh ok. I was just joking. What matters is that you find what works for you. One of the beauty of Linux is that there's a distro for everyone.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

I've been biased in my interpretations because of professional deformation where we use "should" as "you have to do it unless exceptional situations that prevent you to comply".

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Thanks for the update. Have fun!

wwwgem , 5 months ago

OP has solved his issue already but the trick I mentioned could be due to a capacitor issue which can occur anytime and break things that worked before.
I was just trying to help by suggesting an approach that solved the exact same issue on others' laptop running the same distro. Even though not convenient you can either wait for your battery to run out or disconnect it to try this trick.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Exactly.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

That's the beauty of Linux! If you feel adventurous, you always easily find something to tweak/experiment. Since I moved to Linux my mindset and workflow never ceased to evolve. That's because I'm curious but that couldn't be possible in any other OS. Only Linux can offer so much options and an exceptional level of granularity so anyone can build his/herown perfect system. We may achieve the same thing but in different ways and we'll both run Linux.

If you're more shy you can simply install a set of software under a given distro and you're done. This is also a Linux option. Right now, I couldn't find any challenges to keep me busy for more than a day or two until I decided to test a new system (NixOS) in a virtual machine. This is another way to have the kind of fun you mention :)
I love tweaking and improving my system so much that I dedicated my little blog only to that. Sharing is another crucial principles I love in the Linux philosophy.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

If you're looking for something minimal but highly customizable I'd recommend newsboat. For Android I use feedr.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

Thanks for sharing. Can't wait to read some great new stuff!

My little one where I promote some apps I think deserve more love, talk about neovim and zsh cool tweaks, and share my experience with some bigger projects (like building your own split keyboard, testing a new distro...).

https://www-gem.codeberg.page

I also follow https://lazybear.io/index.xml

wwwgem , 5 months ago

I've been scrolling with no hope to see st anywhere but here it is! Only mentioned twice for now but this little guy deserves so much love. Yes, you have to build it (i.e. patch it) but that's actually it's beauty. You get the exact terminal you want, nothing more, nothing less. If you're looking for power and lightweight this is your guy.
Coupled with tmux and you're the God of your system :)

wwwgem , 5 months ago

As always there's no such thing as a global "best" application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.

My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to "really" build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.

I couldn't be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.

This is a very brief overview of what I've experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

I used dwm for few years before moving to bspwm.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

You know how hard it is to explain personal preferences when we talk about tiling WM but, as I mentioned in my first post, I would say that bspwm offer some further granularity. I didn't thought that was possible after using dwm but to come back to my example I have bspwm listening to the state of my media player. Everytime it becomes floating, bspwm resize the window, place it on a specific position, and add a border to it. This is just one example. Also, even though you can use it with any tiling WM, sxhkd has been developed with bspwm in mind and offers the best keybindings management I've ever tested. Thanks to chords, several commands can be associated to independent keybindings within the same piece of code like so:

control+{_,shift+}{1-9}
   bspc {desktop -f,node -d} '^{1-9}' --follow

Control and a number will switch you to a workspace. If you also press Shift the active window will be sent to a given workspace.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

I would need to go back to my old dwm config file but I think what you're looking for is this patch. In bspwm this is achieved with the "follow" option as shown in my example.

To restart dwm without login out and back in you'll need this in your .xinitrc:

while :; do
    ssh-agent dwm
done

Then whenever you kill dwm with kill -HUP $(pidof -s dwm) it will actually be reloaded. Seems like there's also 2 patches to do that now (note that they both mention the above method as well).
https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/restartsig/
https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/selfrestart/

wwwgem , 5 months ago

@dream_weasel Did that help?

wwwgem , 5 months ago

When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that's what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.

wwwgem , 5 months ago

I use ytfzf to search/watch videos on YouTube, Peertube, Odysee.
It has several add-ons including one for playlists. I didn't try it though.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Can you elaborate?
I messed up DNS when I started with Arch and it was easy to recover from that. For text editing, I'm using neovim and can go back with undotree. Of course, if I delete my file and remove it from the trash it's too late. Can you recover deleted files with NixOS?

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

That's what I keep reading and why I would like to give it a try. For now I'm still confused how this is easier/more efficient than sharing your list of packages, restoring a backup, or using downgrade in Arch. I'm really interested because I like to try new stuff, especially if they bring something of interest.

I really have hard time to see the difference for now after my first setup in a VM but also because imaging my full Arch system on a new machine 2 years ago only took me an hour and less than 10 command lines.

Again, I'm genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing. From my reading NixOS seems to be the only distro I could switch to.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Got it. So you can rollback without Internet access. I get that point and Arch can also do that with pacman -U. Again I feel like I'm just stupid and am missing something. Like I said I genuinely try to figure out what it is. NixOS would be the only distro I could consider switching to and that's why I'm currently testing it.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

I can see that from a server maintenance point of view. After having read so many great things about NixOS, I may have exaggerated my expectation and I may be the problem for being a user with too limited needs to get the full benefits of NixOS.

For me this single config file doesn't save that much additional files and most of them would be files you configure only once during installation. Nonetheless I can see how "easier" it would be to save one file instead of 3 to reproduce your system and I can only imagine how much better it is from a server point of view.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Or maybe I'm already too old for so much tech. But thanks for letting me think that I'm still a young boy ^^ Not helping with my question but pretty self satisfactory.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

That's indeed pretty neat.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

Very nice explanation. I also recognize this point for NixOS.After reading so many comments, they all confirm what I've read before and I may realize that my real problem is already having a stable system which means not being in need for some "advanced" recovery options. That being said, I'm still curious and will continue testing NixOS.

Not that I really have too much spare time but I do enjoy learning and tweaking NixOS. With its current development state, things are changing a lot so it can keep me busy for months. That's probably what I was mostly looking for: another toy to play with. Will see if I actually switch to NixOS at some point. Thanks again for your feedback.

wwwgem OP , 5 months ago

You're spot on and that's what this discussion helped me figure out: I have no problem. I knew that but I also thought that NixOS would bring something new to improve my Linux usage. So far I still see such improvements for servers or deployment on several machines but not for a single user with standard needs (and this statement may be wrong and due to my limited experience with NixOS).

But NixOS approach is quite different from others and I feel like I may discover something of interest to me once I learn more about it. Also, just for the sake of learning and discovering, I will continue experimenting with it for a while.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Wish someone would come with something like tut for mastodon.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Any headphones should work (if your hardware supports it if using bluetooth). I've connected at least 4 different brands from no name to Aftershokz with no issues. Even tried airpods for a friend.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

The behavior you are requesting of bspwm is counter-intuitive to this rule you specifically wrote. Nonetheless, if VS Code popup windows have a different instance name, you could have a script running in the background which checks instance name of any new window and execute the command bspc desktop -f last when a VS Code popup appears.
If the instance name is the same for VS Code main app and its popup windows, you may listen to the state of VS Code windows (using bspc subscribe; see the manpage) and execute the previous command on VS Code floating windows (because popups will be floating).
For example, apply this to all VS Code windows:

while bspc subscribe -c 1 node_focus node_state > /dev/null; do
    bspc query -N -n "focused.floating" | while read -r wid; do
    bspc desktop -n $wid -f last
done

For your second question, if I understand correctly you're trying to have a given workspace moving to your external monitor when available and returning to your primary monitor if no other monitor is connected. You can look at the archwiki to learn how to setup bspwm for multi monitors.
Using the same if conditions as explained in this wiki you could also have for example a rule bspc rule -a Code follow=on desktop='^4' when only one monitor is connected, and bspc rule -a Code follow=on desktop='^7' when an external monitor is connected (and workspace 7 will be defined to be shown on your external monitor).

wwwgem , 6 months ago

If you're using only one monitor, simply duplicate and scale your laptop screen instead of using the extended approach.
To give you a rough idea, this will look to something like this:
xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 1366x768 --scale 1x1 --output HDMI1 --same-as eDP1 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 0.711x0.711
Use xrandr to find the monitors names and resolution. The scale option is simply the ratio between your 2 resolutions.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Terminal is faster when you're used to it and sometimes offer more customization options to some apps that has both a GUI and TUI/CLI version.

I use the terminal (st with zsh and tmux) for:

• file management (advcpmv, fd, trash-cli, fzf ...)
• emails (neomutt)
• text editing/coding (neovim)
• project management (taskjuggler)
• image viewing/organization (ucolla,ge)
• online video browsing (ytfzf)
• calendar (khal)
• ssh
• vpn
• news aggregator (newsboat)
• web, bookmarks manager (buku)
• passwords manager (pass)
• dotfiles manager (stow)
• not in the terminal but I also have a lot of scripts used in rofi to control my audio input/outputs, launch a web search, access my bookmarks, autocomplete username and password fields

I'm sure I'm missing some obvious tools I use daily. It's hard remember everything when it becomes so natural.

I have shared my experience with some of these tools here.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Dive in beyond the basic "hjkl:q" though.

This is a video I can't recommend enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XtNXutVto
It's long (>1h) but it's very well made.

It's a long tutor go through with some bonus advanced tweak, and the explanations clearly helps remembering everything easily. If I knew it when I've started that would have saved me so much time and helped me from getting into bad habits I then had to fight against.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

I've often heard Emacs users pose the argument that Emacs as an Elisp interpreter does just one thing. It's just that this single thing allows the myriad of functionality it offers. So in that sense comparing it to a terminal/console seems more apt than comparing it to a text editor. I wonder what you think of that argument.

I only used emacs for a year so I may be wrong but speaking only about how I used it and my current workflow I don't see a difference. Looking at the usage (and not the code), my very first impression of emacs was that it's acting as a terminal multiplexer which I was used to and so I liked this aspect. Anytime you need to do something that goes beyond the tasks of an IDE (calendar, email...) you switch window/panel (I've always been confused with the specific emacs terminology). That's exactly what I'm doing with Tmux where I run neovim and call other apps with a single keybinding. Then I can freely switch from one to another, close one, recall it in the state I've closed it...
Again, this is related to the philosophies of emacs and neovim (i.e. do-it-all or do one thing). While neovim is "only" an IDE, emacs goes beyond, and for me this is not a negative criticism of either app. You build a tool with the coding language you need to implement some functionalities. In that sense, to compare apple to apple, emacs has to be compared to neovim coupled to a terminal multiplexer.

Hehe, that's cool! Currently I'm really happy with Thunderbird so I don't expect to move away anytime soon, but I'll keep it in mind.

I used Thunderbird as well and did the switch mainly to allow me to achieve the workflow described above. I do most of my tasks in the terminal. Neomutt would certainly be one additional layer of complexity in your transition to an IDE, unless you chose to use emacs for your emails. Actually configuring emacs as an email client or going with neomutt is pretty similar. But at the end - and this is an example of the higher level of granularity I mentioned earlier - neomutt is more customizable.
Talking about the level of customization of the IDE functionality only, the plugins I use offer more configuration options in neovim as well.

Orgmode is also one (the?) big star player in emacs and neovim is trying to attract some users by developing a similar thing here or there but this is not something that would benefit to my workflow. This is maybe one of the reason why people choose emacs vs neovim and why I could quit emacs easily. Going back to the coding language, you can see that the use of lua opens new doors to the original vim. What I appreciate though is that you don't have to implement any features if you don't use them in neovim so I can keep my system limited to my needs. This is also seen as a bad thing by some when you start because emacs is capable of quite a lot with a fresh installation while neovim can barely open itself ;)

Overall we're all sharing personal experience so no generalization should be extrapolated from single visions and I'm aware of my own bias and preference for singl- task, lightweight, fast tool.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Do you have any experience with neovim? I'm certainly not a Python programmer but I'm doing simple things for fun and so far neovim served me very well. If I eventually go deeper in Python I would be interested to know the limitations of neovim beforehand.

wwwgem , 6 months ago

It's always difficult to find a good starting point but remember that you're not married to your apps so you can easily switch from one to another and maybe come back later. Over the years, I've seen most of Linux users going that route because 1) it's fun and you learn a little bit from each experience, 2) Linux users are generally curious, 3) some apps may be more suitable to your workflow at a given time but your workflow may change over time, 4) Linux offers us so many options so it's like unleashing kids in a toys store, you want to try everything :)

wwwgem , 6 months ago

Thanks for the information. I'm always happy to hear from others because that's how I make progress. Also with my workflow in constant evolution it's good to know neovim's limitations so I can be prepared.
Being curious by nature I will try other apps with no doubts anyway. I've tried vi, neovim, emacs, but only heard of VS so who knows...