Boy has it been a while.

I have much I want to write about here, and I’m going to do my damnedest to put it all here, but not in a rush; I’m making a mission out of my wishes to see to creative endeavours of mine on a basis with any regularity.

I’m not gonna say anything about that yet because I want to see any evidence that my methods work before I start punishing your eyes for the crime against yourself for choosing to read about my thoughts and feelings.

Well… bye. Thanks for checking out the Amyzone, once again! No, let me try again, uh… made you look! Sucker.

You are obligated under threat of your computer monitor BLOWING UP and sending millions of shards of heated glass and otherwise into your FACE and EYES if you proceed past this point and would be revealed as a sucker in the usual circumstances.

Glad you could make it. Now I can keep the good stuff and more of it, not just for me but especially for you. What I have for you today and right now is something big. So big, in fact, that I didn’t want to put it on this page because I didn’t want it to make the remaining text seem utterly puny in comparison.

See the first of these articles by clicking on that part of the sentence appearing to link to another, magical place. It’s about YouTube, everyone’s favorite, and probably ’only’ option for doing the one simple thing it can’t manage without being a pain in the ass.

zellij is a terminal multiplexer. Terminal multiplexers you may be more familiar with probably include tmux or screen.

In case you don’t know what a terminal multiplexer is, I’ll explain tmux real quick.

Imagine a terminal. Mine looks like this.

I use the fish shell because I like color in my command lines.

You can do a lot with a lone command line. However, sometimes you want multiple terminal programs running at the same time. If you run a program that does a continuous operation you would normally have to stop the process before doing something else.

Enter the terminal multiplexer. In short, it allows you to run a session in which you can spawn multiple ’tabs’ (tmux refers to these as windows) and panes, as many as you want.

In the following example I have btop open on the same terminal screen as my preferred editor, Neovim.

At any time I can split the window vertically or horizontally and open new programs wherever I like. It’s a wonderful tool.

So how does zellij outdo tmux?

tmux is a lot older and has had more time and a larger community to develop plugins and other extensions for it. It is also very customizable, arguably easier to do this with than zellij.

One thing tmux cannot do, however, is proper collaborative or ’multiplayer’ terminal usage.

If you have multiple users attached to the same tmux session at the same time, everyone will see what’s focused and what’s happening. This is good only if one person is doing things at a time. The cursor is singular and multiple users cannot interact with the terminal(s) at the same time as each other.

zellij does allow this.

In this screenshot, both Doom Emacs and Neovim are open side by side.

Imagine there are two users working on a project. One can do programming on the right, the other can do tracking of bugs or ideas or other information and manage the agenda and whatnot of the project.

For me, where customization and extensions are concerned, zellij does leave a bit to be desired – but it can be forgiven for that, being as relatively new as it is, and despite that this one feature makes it stand out in a way that’s hard to ignore. Collaboration with others in this way is very fun, very fast, and doesn’t lead to stepping on each other’s toes as often as can happen under the same conditions on tmux.

I’ve been wanting to get off i3 for a bit. I’ve never been one for status bars or the other things users generally have to do in order to make it more interesting. It has a number of layout features and overall (or at least it seems to be this way to me) feels as though it leans more towards people who use their mouse to orient windows and such.

I fucking hate that, but there are times when I do like using the mouse for things, like resizing windows. I used to be into Ratpoison but the lack of any possible mouse control was one of several problems I had with it. The lack of anything like (optional) window decorations bothered me too.

After downloading herbstluftwm and giving it another spin, it didn’t take me long before I was able to configure it like this:

Now I’m in love with it. There are several things about this screenshot worth mentioning:

• That empty space in the center-right is what’s known as a frame, I think. Whether there is a window inside a frame or not, it can be sized to adjust its dimensions and the dimensions of frames around it.
• The colors of every box-like shape on the screen is customizable. I’ve made it so that inactive windows have darker greens and active windows have brighter greens.
• Setting a background image usually requires a program like feh or nitrogen or something like that which I am too lazy to deal with configuring. herbstluftwm has a line in its template config file that deals with setting a simple background color so I could figure that out in no time.

• herbstclient is the command used to communicate with herbstluftwm. It features TAB completion for shells, including fish. Thank fucking God.

  I’m probably gonna write another section about this window manager whenever I can collect them all better, but I’ll point out one more thing it does better over i3: not only does it have <Mod>+<Arrow> controls for changing window/frame focus by default, it also has <Mod>+h/j/k/l features for the same thing. Moving windows? Same shit, but hold SHIFT. Resizing windows also goes the same except you hold CTRL.

  While I’m sure it wouldn’t be impossible in the slightest to do these things in i3, it definitely doesn’t come like that, and my reluctance to deal with the configuration format had me moving and resizing my windows all the time with my mouse like some kind of sick freak.

  I feel as if I have been standing my whole life and I just sat down.

The people who told me this was a good idea maybe didn’t count on me finding this fun. They probably counted on me finding it an easy way to validate Org Mode’s power.

Sucks for them and the rest of the internet, when it comes to the ~<10 readers I’ll ever have.

If you’re unlucky enough to have read yesterday’s edition of this crap, you’d know that this page used to be the main content of ~amanita.

You would then realize that it is, in fact, not the case any longer. Unfortunately I’ve seen fit to expand the home page with more virtual real estate to link to other disasters I’m responsible for.

Of course Org Mode also makes it simple to add embed data, for terrible software such as Discord.

For example, the main page has five lines that look like this:

  #+HTML_HEAD: <meta content="Amyzone" property="og:title"
  /> #+HTML_HEAD: <meta content="Yuck. Smells like bitch in here."
  property="og:description" /> #+HTML_HEAD: <meta
  content="https://death.town/~amanita" property="og:url"
  /> #+HTML_HEAD: <meta content="https://death.town/~amanita/her.gif"
  property="og:image" /> #+HTML_HEAD: <meta content="#992222"
  data-react-helmet="true" name="theme-color" />

These of course correspond to lines of HTML:

<meta content="Amyzone" property="og:title" />
<meta content="Yuck. Smells like bitch in here." property="og:description" />+
<meta content="https://death.town/~amanita" property="og:url" />
<meta content="https://death.town/~amanita/her.gif" property="og:image" />
<meta content="#992222" data-react-helmet="true" name="theme-color" />

Getting the source code for any of these pages is simple, if you really want. All you need to do is replace the html in the current working URL with org.

To get the source code for this page, you’d go to your browser’s address bar and change

https://death.town/~amanita/blog.html

to

https://death.town/~amanita/blog.org

If you’re still somehow unfamiliar with the .org format, you should read all about Org Mode. That website is also created with Org Mode, by the way, just like this one.

If you aren’t already an Emacs user please consider Doom Emacs, for the sake of your pinky finger. It’s great for both those with experience with Vim’s controls and for those still yet to learn it. (I can’t tell you just how much it is worth it to become familiar with the Vim control scheme. Fucking do it already.)

If you hadn’t read this page before this segment was added, you have no idea what kind of an upgrade the Amyzone got. It wasn’t even called the Amyzone at the time, or at least it didn’t have a banner graphic.

Lots of new things – blinkies, music shit, and more. Whoaaa.

The source for the Amyzone is now kept in a Git repo.

Can’t imagine why you might want it, but if you do,

git clone ssh://death.town:23231/amyzone

Here it is.

I hate nano so goddamn much. More details later.

I might not hate it as much as I hate VS Code.

Org Mode is fantastic. Within literal minutes and no tangible/absorbed/retained experience with HTML whatsoever I had this page up from the mere suggestion that somebody may actually read it.

This page and the .css file styling it were are written remotely on death.town itself from Doom Emacs running locally on my machine. Even the rendering-to-HTML of the .org document comprising this ’blog’ is done remotely.