Hacker News: JNRowe

If you want an out of the box test then playing with river-classic¹ is probably a good place to start. It gives a feel for where you can go, without having to put too much effort in.

For example, it has pluggable layouts where instead of pulling in a lua module(such as awful.layout) in awesome you'll run an external process which handles events. You can even run multiple managers and switch between them with bindings, or write a custom one to scratch that itch. If you're happy with just awful's .suit.tile.right and .suit.max then basically any backend will do.

This is why it feels like a reasonable path off awesomewm to me. I always considered awesomewm to be the WMConstructionKit, and while river changes how you interact there is still a nice route to extensibility. The newer direction even more so than the -classic offshoot.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river-classic

New comment by JNRowe in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

JNRowe — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:01:12 +0000

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

New comment by JNRowe in "Movwin: My (Unpublished) TUI Framework"

JNRowe — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:22:09 +0000

There are plenty of examples where menu display and help texts can be toggled.

For example, aptitude has `Aptitude::UI::Menubar-Autohide` and midnight commander has options in the layout menu to disable menu/buttons/etc. That way beginners get to learn through discovery, and may later choose to switch to calling the menu/action with a keypress. Both of those respond to "standard" F1 for help too.

Would I prefer emacs M-x and C-h style interaction in mc? Yeah, probably. I'm used to it everywhere else(such as zsh). However, as a long term user I can execute basically all the functions even though I've long since disabled the buttons, menus and hints.

The Mysterious XF86AudioPlay Issue

JNRowe — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:03:46 +0000

Article URL: https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2026/05/20/the-mysterious-xf86audioplay-issue/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217735

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

How does Flathub even work? The CDN and caching layer

JNRowe — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:03:31 +0000

Article URL: https://barthalion.blog/flathub-internals-cdn/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147559

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

GNOME GitLab Git traffic caching

JNRowe — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:47:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dragonsreach.it/2026/04/17/gnome-gitlab-git-pulls-caching-improvements/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814300

Points: 27

# Comments: 0

Huion Devices in the Desktop Stack

JNRowe — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:48:24 +0000

Article URL: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2026/04/huion-devices-in-desktop-stack.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762105

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Power consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges (2021)

JNRowe — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:32:39 +0000

Article URL: https://gekkio.fi/blog/2021/power-consumption-of-game-boy-flash-cartridges/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498329

Points: 49

# Comments: 1

New comment by JNRowe in "ASCII and Unicode quotation marks (2007)"

JNRowe — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:40:15 +0000

There is a portable unicode¹ tool available, and it is packaged in a bunch of distributions. I'll spare us the full output, but "unicode a→z" produces something like:

    U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
    UTF-8: 61 UTF-16BE: 0061 Decimal: a Octal: \0141
    a (A)
    Uppercase: 0041
    Category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase); East Asian width: Na (narrow)
    Unicode block: 0000..007F; Basic Latin
    Bidi: L (Left-to-Right)
    Age: Assigned as of Unicode 1.1.0 (June, 1993)
    …
    U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW
    …
    U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z

¹ https://github.com/garabik/unicode

New comment by JNRowe in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

JNRowe — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:30:00 +0000

If you want to relive it then simh¹ with mame² might be an option. There appears to be some support for VT11³, along with docs⁴ to use as a starting point.

No, I'm not claiming to have read all one hundred pages already. However, from what I have read I'd love to see a functional demo.

¹ https://simh.trailing-edge.com/

² https://www.mamedev.org/

³ https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/PDP11/pdp11_vt.c

⁴ https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MAME_and_SIMH