rgoulter

25 ms·

361.
by rgoulter 3y ago
Dvorak is much more comfortable to use than qwerty. The main cost is the fingers needing to re-learn motor memory. Likely with QWERTY your fingers 'knew' where the letters where. When I learned to touch-type Dvorak, my fingers too
362.
by rgoulter 3y ago
For emacs, I've found that putting the modifier keys on home row works well. i.e. tapping the key works as normal, and holding the key acts as Alt/Win/Ctrl/Shift. An advantage to doing things this way is reducing hand mo
363.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> I've always considered the mouse & menu system to be an emergency backup for beginners who have hit a wall. They will probably never be first class citizens. Perhaps, but ideally you'd want your on-ramp experience (or you
364.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> I just wanted to like "terraform apply" a system configuration on my Debian install. I think 'like Terraform, but for the system configuration' is an apt description of NixOS . -- i.e. NixOS is a Linux distribution
365.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> I cannot in good faith recommend it for anything professional. What separates the professional from the 'personal and hobby stuff': the need for (timely) reliability, and that you want other people to be able to maintain it.
366.
by rgoulter 3y ago
To me, it reads like the author tried the tool, thought it was really neat, and discusses the problems they ran into (& how they fixed them). Once they got a simple setup that solved their needs, the author was enthusiastic to apply the
367.
by rgoulter 3y ago
Generally, Nix's strength is allowing for reproducing software behaviour, yeah. I'd say NixOS's declarative config more/less covers the config files, where on non-NixOS you'd edit the files under /etc (and hope
368.
by rgoulter 3y ago
Over half the blogpost is the user describing how they were able to get nix set up on a machine they don't have admin permissions to, and had a 4 GiB disk quota limit. Those constraints don't really apply if you have admin control
369.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> Home-manager needs to add a channel to install it. This will not do. FWIW, I see that nix-portable does support nix flakes, and home-manager also supports nix flakes. (And flakes are a feature which replaces use of channels).
370.
by rgoulter 3y ago
As a fish user on NixOS, I'd say nix is still worth looking at. The fish-related issues came from trying to manage the whole of the fish configuration with Nix. I think that's a fairly niche thing to want to do.
371.
by rgoulter 3y ago
I'm inclined to agree in principle that such tracking should be opt in. In practice, I'd expect the behaviour of the modal complainer to be: 1. to complain about any broken/removed functionality 2. refuse to fix it themselves
372.
by rgoulter 3y ago
Emacs' Magit is an excellent interface for git. e.g. committing the staged changes would involve just "cc". Rewording the last commit is "cw", amending is "ce", and fixing up earlier commits is "cf&qu
373.
by rgoulter 3y ago
It can nice to hear about ideas which are practical improvements, and which others can benefit by. e.g. I don't think trackballs are anywhere near as popular as they deserve to be. (Albeit, with trackballs, showing off is pretty much l
374.
Nix Community Survey 2023(survey.nixos.org)
6 points by rgoulter 3y ago|1 comments
375.
by rgoulter 3y ago
It's possible to have a full system setup with shell scripts. The only things I'm aware of people doing are copy-pasting the "install these packages" when setting up a system. When it comes to reliably getting a system t
376.
by rgoulter 3y ago
One example was "I want to run an old version of Hugo". In the time since running the old version of hugo, enough about the system had changed: - The OS had changed significantly (so re-running an old build didn't work). - Th
377.
by rgoulter 3y ago
Writing a shell script to install packages, hoping it's idempotent, isn't to the level of "[do it] once, and you won't have to do it ever again!". Installing a list of packages is relatively easy, sure. A NixOS syst
378.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". For those not familiar: Nix tooling introduced flakes. The commun
379.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> Does it make sense to use nix during the image build process to precisely define dependencies I want to have in the resulting container? Using a dockerfile with a step like "RUN nix ..."? You can, but it strikes me as a cumbe
380.
by rgoulter 3y ago
> Is it a complete replacement for Docker? Docker mainly does two things: there's Docker images as a way of sharing some container-image, and the container runtime to allow running those images for tasks or services in isolated&#x2F
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by rgoulter 3y ago
I think two questions have to be considered, then: How would you phrase the question/game so that 100% of people all get the same answers as you? How would you expect others to phrase the question, so that you'd 100% agree with th
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by rgoulter 3y ago
> outside it seems to be an accepted fact of life that having rules surrounding the conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing. I think this talks past concerns. "Just kick out the rude people" is probably a good t
383.
by rgoulter 3y ago
vi is ubiquitous, so it's still a useful thing to have learned. Especially for fresh linux installs, or in default VM environments, it's useful to be able to use vi. Though, IME the cost of learning something like kakoune or helix
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by rgoulter 3y ago
> It is hard to overcome the fact that vi clones have been around for a bazillion years, will almost certainly outlive all of us, and will always be in every repo. Vi's ubiquity & longevity are good reasons to learn vi as at lea
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by rgoulter 3y ago
> I'm having a really hard time working on new, non-LLM related side projects due to anxiety that everything I'm doing is effectively worthless. Is there really only joy in programming stuff if you think what you're doing
386.
by rgoulter 3y ago
I think nix falls under "second best at everything" in this regard. If there's a single thing Nix solves, it's being able to declare packages with a pure/functional language. This ends up enabling all sorts of usefu
387.
by rgoulter 3y ago
I've heard good things about https://zero-to-nix.com/
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by rgoulter 3y ago
Reminds me of this more abstract perspective: you can draw an analogy between working the filesystem, and programming languages working with memory. https://www.tweag.io/blog/2022-07-14-taming-unix-with-nix/
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by rgoulter 3y ago
Yes, but 'pure' might mean different things at different levels. In a programming language, 'pure' would just refer to "function where you get the same output from the same input; no side effects". In parent&#x
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by rgoulter 3y ago
> Which widely used, existing software tools is it analogous to? It's kinda like Docker, but without the images/containers. Docker solves two problems: distributing the same program everywhere, and running those programs using

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