Saturday, March 30, 2019

skipping over already-visible workspaces in xmonad

I recently went back to a two-monitor setup on my work system (an Intel NUC I bought back in November). For the most part this has been a big improvement, and xmonad handles multi-screen layouts just as well as I remembered. Each screen displays a workspace, and they can be switched independently.

I have had one nagging complaint: I have a bunch of pre-configured workspaces and tend to cycle through with them with the arrow keys. When I switched to a workspace that was already displayed on the other screen, it’d swap onto the current screen. This seems like a pretty minor thing, but in practice it tends to add confusion - I might, for example, have a page of notes up on one display and be trying to quickly navigate on the other display for items from mail, code, IRC, etc., to summarize in the notes. If that workspace jumps around, it’s easier to lose track of what I’m doing.

I wondered if it was possible to “lock” a workspace to a specific display. I still don’t know the answer to that question, but skimming the docs for XMonad.Actions.CycleWS I found an alternative that mostly solves my problem.

Originally I had the following keybindings in my xmonad.hs:

  ("M-<Right>", nextWS)
, ("M-<Left>", prevWS)

These have been replaced with:

  ("M-<Left>", moveTo Prev HiddenWS)
, ("M-<Right>", moveTo Next HiddenWS)

In practice this means that the workspace cycling for mod-Left and mod-Right will skip over any already-visible workspaces, leaving them in place on the other display. There are other possibilities, including the next/previous empty workspace, but this is pretty close to what I was looking for.

tags: topics/notes, topics/technical, topics/xmonad

p1k3 / 2019 / 3 / 30

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Every time I declare tab bankruptcy and close the 15 to 25 things I have open in a web browser, I suspect I’m losing state I will later regret being unable to retrieve.

That generalizes, I suppose. I have this sense that a lot of what we do in software is something like writing code before the use of version control systems became a norm.

All kinds of relationships and structures remain implicit, undescribed, and impossible to model because they live purely in ephemeral application state. The best we have in a lot of cases is fragile browser history, notification backlogs in e-mail, or logs accumulated on other people’s computers for purposes directly hostile to our interests.

tags: topics/technical, topics/version-control

p1k3 / 2019 / 3 / 14

Sunday, March 3, 2019

notes on notes

First of all, I wrote up some notes on my current note-taking process.

❂

I started to do this the other day as a regular, dated p1k3 entry, but it got sort of long and I found myself wanting to do it as a standalone document that I could update over time. It seemed like a table of contents would be nice, but that’s not something that wrt supports, so I decided to see how hard it would be to add based on the hacky rendering script I wrote for userland.

That turned out to be a hassle to do well for various reasons, so I turned to Pandoc, which supports generating a table of contents out of the box.

There’s a Perl wrapper for the pandoc binary, so I first tried using that to add a simple <pandoc>…</pandoc> pseudo-tag to wrt’s markup processing the way I’ve done for Textile, Markdown, and other things in the past. It turns out that in order to get a table of contents out of Pandoc while still generating an HTML fragment (rather than a complete document), you have to write a custom template file. It also turns out that if you want to automatically put self-links next to headers, you need to write a custom filter to transform Pandoc’s abstract syntax tree.

I gave up on modifying wrt to handle this and switched to writing a small Makefile, a filter.py, and a template to generate HTML for inclusion by wrt. You can see the results here or on my gitea instance. I kind of hate the outcome and I’m not sure I’ll do anything this way again, but I definitely learned some stuff about Pandoc. I suppose this might be a useful example for someone.

tags: topics/notes, topics/pandoc, topics/technical, topics/wrt

p1k3 / 2019 / 3 / 3