Just installed #OpenBSD on my #Thinkpad #X60 - a very old #32bit laptop. Works fine, still usable for everything except web browsing. OpenBSD has no #firefox or #Chromium in the official repos. For modern web browsing #Dillo or #Netsurf just can't handle the job. I use #suckless #surf web browser but it crashes very often 

Lol, #suckless st turned down a bidirectional text support patch. I mean, it’s quite expected, but still disappointing 🤷

Spent the day exploring heirloom-ex-vi (n-t-roff). It's
essentially the cleaned-up 1985 ex/vi 3.7 code, brought
forward by Gunnar Ritter and Carsten Kunze: small, simple,
and very readable — about 25k LOC for the editor itself,
versus 38k for nvi. The memory footprint is lower too,
around 3MB RSS against nvi's 6MB in typical use, and it
feels snappy in daily use.

The limits are by design rather than oversight. Fixed
temp-file blocks and a line-pointer table capped at
LBLKS=900 in the default build give you about 230k lines,
or roughly 30MB of text. Beyond that, you get the classic
"Tmp file too large" — and that's fine, because a screen
editor isn't the right tool for huge files anyway.

Trade-offs worth knowing: no set ruler, single-level
undo, and a hard ceiling on file size. nvi is more
practical for daily work, especially if you live in YAML
where column awareness matters. But heirloom is closer to
the original, and the codebase is genuinely beautiful.
Worth a look.

For anyone curious about the details, I keep a longer note
on heirloom-ex-vi here:

https://repo.or.cz/code-notes.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/notes/Exploring_Heirloom_ex_vi.txt.

Updated today with the LARGEF rebuild instructions for
files beyond the default ceiling.

#vi #unix #suckless #nvi

the secret to surviving years of WM-hopping:

sxhkd handles the keys.
the WM handles the windows.
dmenu handles the launching.

swap any one. the others don't notice.

#suckless #unix #dwm

Finally tested wayback with dwm on Slackware -current! 🎉

wayback is a stub Wayland compositor that hosts a rootful Xwayland server, letting you run your full X11 setup unchanged on top of Wayland. Built from source, wrote a small launch script and dwm came up fine with st.

Still experimental and needs some tweaking but the core concept works — keep your dwm, st and all your suckless tools, just drop Xorg underneath.

If you're a minimalist X11 user not ready to jump to a Wayland WM, keep an eye on this project!

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

#dwm #wayland #linux #suckless #slackware #xorg