flubba86 @ flubba86 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I get what you mean, it is an interesting question to explore.

For me, it think it appeals to my obsessive engineer-brain, I am hooked on chasing efficiency.

Eg, if one tool uses 10MB ram and takes 1second to complete a task, and another tool takes 50MB ram and 5 seconds to complete the same task, then clearly I want to use the more efficient one. The other must be wasting resources, right?

When it comes to real life software and real tasks, it is a lot more complicated than that, there are hundreds of variables to take into account and compare. But if one tool stands out among the others, optimising to achieve the best number (fastest time, lowest power draw, lowest ram use, etc) in each comparable variable, then I absolutely must use that one, it would be irresponsible not to, right?

Throw hardware acceleration into the mix, and it takes the situation to a new level. Why make my poor CPU render the text on the screen 60 times per second, when I can get the GPU to do it? It's just sitting there doing nothing, and it's better at the job anyway, and as a bonus you get even lower CPU utilisation and lower ram usage.

However, as I described in my previous post, chasing these numbers can come at the cost of usability. That's the case with Alacritty, and why I will be switching to wezterm.

Wow, just had a look at the Wezterm GitHub page, read the features and the docs. I think you're right, it does look like it will replace Alacritty for me.

For anyone else wondering about the differences between Alacritty and wezterm, or still on the fence, read this thread, particularly the comment from wez: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/1769

I've been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it's kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It's written in Rust, it's super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It's top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.

However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won't add because they're outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs ("just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm") or a scrollbar ("just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux"), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window ("why would anyone ever want to do that?").

My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.

I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it's got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.

I would say that someone is "in too deep" or something about "contextually saturated" or "contextually normalised".

Lol, that reminds me of when I was in Uni, I had a systems development class, they taught in C, all the lectures, tutorials and assessments were done in C. Our final assignment was handed out the week the first Rust v1.0.0 build dropped in 2015. I had been following the hype around the development of Mozilla's new language, and I was so keen, I asked my professor if I could complete my final assignment using Rust. He said it's a great idea. Then cut to me furiously trying to learn Rust in just two weeks, so I could even start the assignment, including C interop, implementing functions with c-style interfaces for callbacks, and lots of unsafe blocks for memory manipulation and pointer manipulation. In the end I was just forcing Rust to be C.

It did work in the end, and I did get an A, mostly because the professor couldn't understand any of the Rust code.

Yes please. Sign me up.

Nobara these days. It's based on Fedora 38.

In my experience, it's always P@ssw0rd

Your CPU compiles shaders, the GPU runs them. Vulkan shader pre-processing is a form of pre-compiling all the possible shaders your GPU might need before it runs the game (to avoid stutters and freezes later). This is done on the CPU.

Reminds me of this old meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/868/Screen_Shot_2017-05-02_at_2.43.53_PM.jpg

I find it funny that the four major categories of spending you chose are: housing, computer parts, food, and tws earbuds.

I was using Inconsolata for about 5 years, then switched to Inconsolata-g when that came out, for another 5 years. But it's a pretty old font and is TrueType and it's hinting is bad, so doesn't render well on Linux and it misses out on a lot of new font features.

In 2019 I went hunting for a new favourite font, and tried out a whole bunch, giving each one a week in my IDE to really get to know it. During that time I realised I had a bunch of basic requirements for a font that some do better than others:

• Similar characters should be distinct: eg, uppercase O and number 0. Uppercase I, lowercase l, and number 1. It's weird how many popular coding fonts fail to make these clear.
• Not too wide, and not too narrow. You'd think monospace fonts are all around the same size horizontally, but a standard 80-column slab of code can vary greatly in screen space width depending on the font, some are much too wide. Consolas is an example that is too wide. I like to have the option to tile three code panes side-by-side on a 1080P screen.
• Easy to read. For some reason a lot of coding-specific fonts affect my ability to quickly and easily read the code, and some give me a headache.

I realised that my use of Inconsolata for such a long time in the early stages of my career definitely shaped my preferences. I was looking for something similar to Inconsolata. That was when I discovered Fantasque Sans Mono. It's a kind of weird looking font, maybe a bit too playful for a serious coding font, but I found I could read and parse code much faster (maybe it helps with mild dyslexia?), each letter is very distinct from every other. It has elements of handwriting, it has elements of a dyslexic font, it has similarities to Inconsolata.

I've been using Fantasque (with Nerdfonts mixins) for 4 years now. Since then there has been a renaissance of code fonts, like Jet Brains Mono, and Fira Code. I like those, they are good fonts, but I keep going back to Fantasque, it feels so comfortable to use.

Every car I've owned has been used. Some are better than others. In general, I've had really good luck and have bought some great cars, but some have been money pits. You get better at spotting a good buy, but it's still possible to get a bad one, it does come down do luck.

I used be a computer technician at a small town computer shop around 2008-2011. More than half of our customers were over 60.

Sometimes I needed to take some tech support calls, and sometimes I needed to make house calls to troubleshoot the folks issues.

Literally every support call started with "Why doesn't the email work?" while the actual problem ranged from ISP issues, and modem faults, PC faults, Windows configuration errors, to dead monitors or a broken mouse. Literally any computer fault could be described as a failure to access their email.

The Dell XPS Developer Edition, aka Project Sputnik.

Well, now we know it's a pair of slow motion side cutters in your bag that causes it. Hooray for science, and the human pursuit of knowledge.

+1 for micro. I install it on every server I administer, and alias it to nano. If you're a nano user and haven't tried micro, I highly recommend it. It's like nano, but built this century, it feels fast and modern.

That's a good point about it going last in your PATH. Malicious applications running as non-root can still install payloads to ~/.local/bin and hijack common system functions.

You wake up the next day .. "why is there so much duct tape on the fish tank? ... Oh no."

Twangathang.