• Tmux Project Switching Experimenting with ways to switch between tmux servers
• Squasher Progress Finally just sat down and built a prototype
• Opal The Ruby to JavaScript transpiler
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Tmux Project Switching

After my discovery of how powerful tmux display-popup is I had more of a poke to try and solve a problem I have at work. That problem is that we use tmux -L blah to create specific servers for each project we work on, this is because each project requires different environment variable values and you can’t easily do that otherwise.

For instance, each project will define a DATABASE_URL and a PORT to make sure you can run them simultaneously. But if you just do a tmux it’ll connect to the default server and the first projects environment will always be the one loaded, even if you detach and do tmux somewhere else.

Initially I wrote a bit of a complicated ruby script that looks for the sockets and uses that to in combination with another really cool tmux feature tmux display-menu. It works well but only for currently running servers and sessions.

If you’re interested in this, you can download my ruby script, put it in your path and chmod +x it, then just add bind s run-shell tmux-server-switch to your .tmux.conf. Then when you do ^B s you should see a little popup to switch sessions across all servers.

Squasher Progress

I sat down last night and decided to do something a little silly to get myself unstuck on this project. I kept worrying about “how to do it perfectly” and overthinking every step. So I sat down with my laptop, put a chill video on in the background, and just gave myself permission to write bad code to achieve the simplest possible result.

This is something I can get a little hung up on when developing something open source. I get in my head that every commit has to be a perfect example of great code instead of reality. There’s every chance I’ll re-write the git history before opening it up but history has often shown I’m too lazy for that, so you’ll be able to dig and see what I did.

I am happy to report that I did get a basic prototype working with the Jumpy Alien example project for Taylor!

The interesting thing to note is that it includes every .rb file that’s in your load_path according to the taylor-config.json file. So you’ll see in the playground that it also includes the files from under test/ even though they aren’t used.

Obviously this is just a prototype and weird things like this are to be expected for now. I’m not entirely sure how I want to handle things like that. I’m not convinced I’d be able to implement a tree shaking algorithm or anything fancy like that. But maybe just a simple export-ignore option? Lemme know what you think in the comments.

Opal

The Opal project has caught my eye and got me wanting to try it out. This surprises me as I’m usually not a big fan of high level language to high level language transpilers. I feel it leads to obfuscated errors and harder debugging.

But something about Opal, which transpiles Ruby to JavaScript, has got me wanting to give it a try. I haven’t actually had a play with it yet and I’m not sure I’ll make the time. But I still wanted to highlight it as I think writing a reactive frontend in Ruby sounds a lot nicer than writing one in JavaScript.

Specifically seeing the Glimmer DSL Web project has gotten me interested in trying Opal. I feel like the README doesn’t do it justice and that an example project would help me understand it a lot better.

Interesting Links

Welcome to Hanakai: Exciting news for Hanami, Dry, and Rom getting a new brand.

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse: Someone discovering why they like the Fediverse so much compared to big corporate social media.

A Tale of Three WebAssembly Runtimes: I only skimmed his as my brain has been a bit mush this week, but it’s a very interesting breakdown of interpreting WebAssembly.

Agentic Coding is a Trap: Another post about how not programming actively makes your programming skills deteriorate.

Dirty Optimization Secrets (C for Playdate): Some nice technical optimisations for [Playdate] development in C. [Playdate]: https://play.date/

The Complexity of Simplicity: A refreshing look at the different types of complexity in software.

The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility: As a person who doesn’t currently need accessibility aides I find it hard to remember there are people that do need them. So when I come across an article like this I try to pay close attention.

• I Started Streaming Again Streaming my Tetris on Twitch
• Tmux Display Popup Switching from FTerm to tmux display-popup
• Comments! I've added comments to my blog
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

I Started Streaming Again

Check me out on Twitch! I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. I’m just treating it as a fun little hobby and it’s letting me easily record my Tetris accomplishments to put onto theabsolute.plus.

Maybe I’ll do some live programming and game development, but for now it’s just for playing Tetris and chilling out. Feel free to come and chat programming with me, I always love that!

Tmux Display Popup

I decided to stop using the built in terminal (and thus FTerm) in Neovim and instead switch to using tmux’s display-popup option.

This was surprisingly painful to get to feel nice, so I decided to write a blog post about it

Comments!

I’ve added comments to my blog. I’ve thought about how to do this for a while and decided to go the ultra low-tech route and just setup a mailto link at the bottom of all my blog posts. When someone emails me I’ll add their comment to the page and push it out.

Give it a try by clicking this link!

Interesting Links

DragonRuby’s Seventh Year - Where We Started and Where We’re Going: DragonRuby is an amazing project and I can’t believe it’s already been seven years!

Using Rust to Build a $1 Handheld Gaming Console: Amazing results and an impressive use of Rust. Sometimes I wonder if I should pick Rust up.

Ruby Concurrency: What Actually Happens: I love a good Ruby deep dive and this one doesn’t dissapoint.

Technomancy in which more paths are charted towards code independence: Sometimes I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface with git, this post is one that makes me feel that extra hard.

Let’s Build an RPG: Quest 3 – Quest Tracking: The series continues! I think making a GameBoy game is a great place to learn about programming.

• Intro
• The Files
• Breaking It Down
• Running Commands from Neovim
• Outro
• Comments

Intro

I’ve known of the display-popup feature in tmux for a while now but have been happy enough with my Neovim using FTerm until recently. As I’ve made more and more use of this functionality I’ve found myself being tripped up by my muscle memory. Using the terminal inside Neovim comes with some overlapping shortcuts when doing things inside it. I’m also being tripped up by the differences between tmux and the Neovim terminal being close but just different enough.

A particularly nasty situation comes about because I do all of my development inside of tmux. This means I’m running Neovim inside of tmux, then I’ll open the Neovim terminal to create a git commit, which spawns another Neovim inside of that.

This isn’t insurmountable but it is quite annoying and I finally gave tmux display-popup a try and it solved a lot of these muscle memory issues and overlapping keyboard shortcut problems for me.

Once everything is setup, it looks like this:

The Files

You can just grab my dotfiles!

Or if you just want super basic versions of the files:

.tmux.conf

# Popups are neat
bind t display-popup -w 80% -h 80% -T "Shell" -E "tmux-popup"

bind -T popup C-b switch-client -T popup-prefix
bind -T popup-prefix t run "tmux display-popup -c $(tmux list-clients -F '##{client_name}' | head -n 1) -C"
bind -T popup-prefix [ copy-mode
bind -T popup-prefix Any switch-client -T popup

tmux-popup

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

session="popup"

if ! tmux has -t "$session" 2> /dev/null; then
  tmux new-session -d -s "$session"
  tmux set-option -s -t "$session" key-table popup
  tmux set-option -s -t "$session" status off
  tmux set-option -s -t "$session" prefix None
fi

exec tmux attach -t "$session" > /dev/null

Breaking It Down

That’s a lot to take in all at once! Let’s break it down a bit and look at how it all works.

bind t display-popup -w 80% -h 80% -T "Shell" -E "tmux-popup"

This creates a key bind that launches a popup that takes up 80% width and 80% height of the terminal. It gives the popup a title of “Shell” and launches our tmux-popup script inside of it.

Before we look at the rest of .tmux.conf file, let’s look at our tmux-popup script as that will make the rest of the config file make sense.

This is just a variable assignment, the blog I took inspiration from had a much more complicated setup that I’ve altered.

session="popup"

This checks if a tmux session with that name exists and if it doesn’t it then executes…

if ! tmux has -t "$session" 2> /dev/null; then

This creates the new session named popup then…

tmux new-session -d -s "$session"

We configure that session to use a tmux key-table called popup so it doesn’t use the default prefix key-table that tmux uses.

tmux set-option -s -t "$session" key-table popup

We hide the status bar if it’s turned on globally.

tmux set-option -s -t "$session" status off

We also disable prefix so you can’t use a lot of tmux’s features. This is a personal preference as I found it got a bit fiddly otherwise.

tmux set-option -s -t "$session" prefix None

Finally we actually attach to the new popup session.

exec tmux attach -t "$session" > /dev/null

With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at our keybinds in .tmux.conf now. This is a trick I used to make it seem like we’re still using the prefix of Ctrl + b (the tmux default and the one I still use). This switches us to another key-table so we can easily limit what we’re able to do here.

bind -T popup C-b switch-client -T popup-prefix

This is where a lot of the complication of this setup comes from. I wanted the same set of key presses to both open the popup and also close it. This proved a lot more difficult than expected and if you’re more of a tmux/bash guru than me you’ll probably want to change this line.

This binds tmux display-popup -C which closes any open popups, the trick part comes from needing to specify the client to actually send that request too. This is because if you send it to the popup session it doesn’t work, you need to select the parent session. Since my workflow is really simple. I only ever have one session in a server plus my popup session. So we just use tmux list-clients to grab the first one and send the command there.

bind -T popup-prefix t run "tmux display-popup -c $(tmux list-clients -F '##{client_name}' | head -n 1) -C"

This let’s us enter copy-mode the same as normal a tmux session which will act the same as always.

bind -T popup-prefix [ copy-mode

Finally this catches any other key and sets the key-table back so we need to do Ctrl + b again.

bind -T popup-prefix Any switch-client -T popup

Running Commands from Neovim

The final piece of this puzzle was a small Lua function to run shell commands from Neovim inside of this popup. I spent some time trying to get this to take another table or a string in as that’s how my commands were being run before, but I failed to do so simple and decided that this was fine for now.

function run_in_popup(cmd)
  vim.system(
    { "tmux-popup", "-d" }, { },
    function()
      vim.system({ "tmux", "send-keys", "-t", "popup", cmd, "C-m" })
      vim.system({
        "tmux", "display-popup",
        "-w", "80%",
        "-h", "80%",
        "-T", "Shell",
        "-E", "tmux attach -t popup"
      })
    end
  )
end

Outro

This is what it looks like with my full config setup.

I decided to write this blog post as I spent a fair bit of energy the past couple of days getting this working nicely. I thought it would be nice to give back to the community and document everything I figured out.

• Neospec v0.0.2 released
• Poros v0.6.0 and v0.7.0 released
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Neospec

I finally had a need for neospec in one of my Ruby projects. That’s when I realised all the improvements I’ve made haven’t been pushed to ruby gems. I also realised that the build was half migrated to LocalCI so I fixed that up and did a release.

Poros

I had speed issues with my budgeting application I’ve built and finally decided to figure out why. It turned out to be a simple n+1 query. I was tempted to add some sort of preloading functionality but realised that actually wouldn’t help with the problem I was having. Instead I added a simple query caching system to Poros so repeat queries are significantly faster. This dropped my page load speed down from 12~ seconds to 1~ second.

The reason I did two releases was because I didn’t think to just use gem "poros", path: "../poros" after adding the logging and instead did a release. I guess I was thinking that the problem wouldn’t be in Poros? Either way, I ended up doing the query caching and releasing that in v0.7.0.

I do just want to say, this was built as an experiment to learn how ORMs works but I do find it really useful. It’s great when you don’t want to go through the hassle of even setting up SQLite.

Interesting Links

Crystal 1.20.0 is released!: A new Crystal release, a fantastic language I really need to go back and check out again.

Why Crystal, 10 Years Later: Performance and Joy: This post has been a big driver behind my desire to go deep on Crystal again.

Optimizing Ruby Path Methods: A great deep dive on how Ruby path methods work and how they’ve been sped up. This is also an amazing blog and you should follow it.

• Taylor Squasher Brainstorming around implemntation
• Taylor Has a Community Site It finally happened!
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Taylor Squasher

I’ve decided to pick this project back up and give it a serious attempt. I do believe there’s some huge value to be had here. Right now I’ve mostly just sat down and thought about what I want to tackle and how I want to tackle it.

I think I have some decent ideas that’ll let me implement require_relative too, but that’ll take a little experimenting before I’m confident.

Taylor Has a Community Site

You read that right, Taylor officially has a community site! I did the big announcement over on Taylor’s blog if you want the details, or you can just go check it out!

Interesting Links

Finding inspiration and a bit of hope in CorgiSpace: Making many small games is such a great way to grow as a developer and have fun. I need to do more of this myself!

How Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke ext4 Hardlinks: It turns out hardlinks have limits on EXT4 (among other filesystems).

ZFS helped to remove code: I love it when an off the shelf solution works well enough to replace a homebrew solution.

TruffleRuby 34 is Released: Full compatibility with Ruby 3.4!

Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes: The little language that could, I love seeing new Zig releases. It’s an incredibly interesting language.

Add DOS platform support (DJGPP): SDL3 now runs on DOS!

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client: It’s great to see people actively developing simple tools for the Fediverse.

• Taylor's Five Year Anniversary It's been five whole years since I started Taylor
• Refactored Taylor's Config handling Noticed this area was really bad and cleaned it up
• Taylor Export Woes Found an issue with my exports
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Taylor’s Five Year Anniversary

I wrote a whole blog post so go check it out!

I’m just so blown away at how far I’ve come with Taylor. It even lead to me getting my current job!

Refactored Taylor’s Config handling

An issue was raised because I have a discrepancy between the documentation and the code. In the code taylor-config.json is the file used for configuring all your Taylor needs. In the documentation I call it taylor_config.json. An easy fix right? Just rename the documentation? Well yes, that did fix it.

I looked closer at the code though because I briefly considered supporting both as a politeness. I did not end up doing that but I did not how awful the configuration handling is inside Taylor. So I took some time and completely refactored the configuration handling and created the Taylor::Config class to help out. This has reduced the amount of magic strings across the codebase and now lets developers easily use this configuration for themselves if they wanted.

Taylor Export Woes

The build for my previous config change broke on the web test suite. I thought this was really strange and was able to reproduce it locally. It just boots up, runs the C++ code portion of Taylor, then does nothing, and exits.

This took a decent chunk of debugging, lots of puts statements, and even going back commits. But the strangest thing was the mrb state didn’t claim to have an exception when running the mrb_load_irep method to load the test suite.

Interestingly going back to earlier commits didn’t fix this and it started happening on my Linux builds too. This made me realise something important, the actual cause. It was because I wasn’t locking the version of MRuby used in the export Docker image but I was locking it to 3.4.0 when I compile libmruby.a. So the most recent commits to MRuby seem to have changed how the bytecode is generated. This meant the older 3.4.0 version of MRuby couldn’t load and run it.

The fix isn’t that interesting, it’s mostly just me locking the MRuby version so this doesn’t happen again.

Interesting Links

Sailing The High Seas: An Interview with Chantey Dev K.C. Gortyn Code: This game seems really fun, I will have to buy a copy.

The Kirby Frame: A damn good way to actually stop misinformation and bad faith arguments.

JRuby 10.0.5.0 Released : Always good to see alternative Ruby implementations going well.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the art education: This frames AI content in a way I haven’t seen yet and is well worth the read.

Rethinking HTTP Benchmarking: Why I Built cryload with Crystal: A new web server benchmarking tool written in Crystal.

How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU: I love seeing how old games overcame limitations with clever code.

Making of words.zip: Very cool breakdown of how their infinite word search MMO game was made

• Mental Health It's low right now
• Tetris Tattoo I finally got it!
• Taylor Community Started the styling process
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Mental Health

I feel the quality and depth of these blogposts has started falling and it’s definitely because of my low mental health at the moment. There’s a lot going on that I will not post about here, but I’m hoping my situation improves soon as I miss having the creativity and motivation to do cool shit with computers.

Honestly, all I’ve had the energy for has been to play more Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS. Thankfully I do enjoy that and my consistency is going up. I’m more regularly hitting levels 800+ and even 900+.

Tetris Tattoo

Speaking of Tetris, I finally got my tattoo to celebrate my GrandMaster ranking in Tetris the Grand Master! I got the design made and tattoo’d by Stef from Little Harajuku Tattoo.

Taylor Community

I’ve finally committed to styling the pages and wanted to share a sneak preview, it’s not the most exciting but I think it’s consistent with everything else I’ve been doing and think it’s easy to use.

Interesting Links

A eulogy for Vim: An impressive amount of effort dedicated here to avoiding LLM generated code. I won’t be switching any time soon but it’s nice to see people fighting even harder than me.

How to Install a Gem: A great dive into what actually happens when you type gem install.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.: Another article about LLM usage, but one that hits close to home for me.

At a Glance

• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Interesting Links

Squeezing Every Frame from Godot on Mobile: A great dive into optimising Godot.

I’m OK being left behind, thanks!: I needed this reminder that you don’t have to jump on every new trend, you can wait and see how things pan out before making a decision.

Go Home, Windows EXE, You’re Drunk: Just absolutely bonkers things you can do with Wine and an EXE.

How ZJIT removes redundant object loads and stores: Definitely not feeding the “let’s build a compiler” bug in my brain right now…

The Social Smolnet: Such a wholesome reminder you can do things the simple way.

• Taylor Community Rewrote the live update mechanism
• Desk Cleanup Finally cleaned up my desk again
• Arcade Stick Modding Modded my Arcade Stick
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Taylor Community

I’ve rewritten the live updating mechanism. I was tempted to switch away from htmx but decided to stick with it in the end but needed a better architecture. The biggest issue was actually how I figured out what had updated. I was just asking each type of record I cared about if they had been updated. It kind of worked but it didn’t handle the case of things being deleted and it required quite a few different database queries to figure out.

The new architecture now has a model for all the updates in the system that I care about. When you update a post it creates an Update record that says a post was updated. When you delete a post it creates an Update record that says a post was deleted. This has cleaned up that whole code path a lot.

Desk Cleanup

Finally got the energy up over the weekend to clean my desk up. Including pulling apart my keyboard and giving it a thorough clean. I also took the opportunity to replace the AI generated desk mat I accidentally bought without realising it was AI generated with one made by an actual artist.

Arcade Stick Modding

The parts I ordered all arrived so I spent about an hour getting them all installed into my 8BitDo Arcade Stick and it has come out amazing! It’s genuinely so nice to be able to play Tetris the Grand Master 4 comfortably on the couch as efficiently as I do at my desk.

I’m really happy with the button colour choices. They look even better than I had hoped when I was planning it out. Also they came a lot quicker than expected, the estimated arrival for half of them was early next month.

P.S. I also posted this over on Reddit as I found a neat trick for getting the 5-pin joystick to plug in nicely.

Interesting Links

Some Words on WigglyPaint: This really saddens me, people will steal anything for a quick buck.

From Heroku to Render: Render sounds nice, I like the sound of the Database URL button.

Introducing Loom: A nice new [TUI] framework for [Go] that’s more reactive. [TUI]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface [Go]: https://go.dev/

• Rails Template Making a Rails template for myself
• Jumpy Alien I finished this example game
• Taylor Playground Some minor tweaks to the playground
• Switch to KDE Reinstalled Fedora and decided to try KDE
• Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
• Comments

Rails Template

I’ve done a bit of a dive on making my own Rails template to setup projects just the way I like. The big appeal for me is that I end up spending the first night on any project just getting the base setup and it’s almost always the same, so I figured there’s some decent value behind making a proper template.

So far I’ve got Phlex setup with a basic layout and root page and I’ve got esbuild working with TypeScript and htmx.

I have some plans to put in some generators to help speed up development, but that’s probably gonna be a bit.

Jumpy Alien

I spent some time this weekend and finished polishing off the Jumpy Alien example for Taylor!

The final touches ended up being:

• Hitboxes for sky and ground
• Sound effects
• Backgronud music
• Settings menu
• Volume settings
• Logo

Play the Game!

Taylor Playground

I have made some changes to the Taylor Playground too. I’ve added some music so you can have background music, I’ve added sound effects, and finally I’ve added a licenses section so you can see where all they assets came from.

Switch to KDE

I wanted to delete my Windows partition so that I had more space on my Solid State Drive (SSD). I decided to do a full reinstall of Fedora and thought I’d try out KDE as it’s been a long time since I last tried it.

I’m honestly very surprised at how far it has come. It’s extremely nice and I’ve had basically no issues whatsoever with it. I genuinely believe this may become my preferred desktop environment.

Interesting Links

Why do NES colors look so different in emulators?: This taught me about how colours worked for over the air television.

I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform: A pretty good take on LLMs.

So you want to write an “app”: A painful look into building a UI application on a bunch of systems.

Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it: A fun journey of building a text editor.

The Complete History of Tetris the Grand Master: An amazing documentary series of the history of Tetris the Grand Master.