Re: wayland or tmux

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I know I do a lot of Emacs proselytizing on this phlog, and I'm sure

the vanishingly small number of people who read my stuff are sick of

it, but I read this post on uninformative.de [1] and it struck such a

chord of familiarity that I can't hold myself back. :)

The post describes how the author, frustrated with the declining

support for X11, is hunting for new ways to continue remaining in

control of their computer. Not control in the philosophical free

software is freedom sense (although this is obviously of paramount

importance!) but in the very pragmatic and somewhat orthogonal sense

of being easily able to completely customize their interaction with

their computer that was previously afforded by the relative ease of

writing X11 window managers.

Their proposed solutions are (a) trying to become productive with

Wayland, and (b) doubling down on tmux.

The Wayland approach to this kind of problem is what I think of as a

"horizontal" approach: my current (ideal) interaction "shell" is being

deprecated, hence I'm going to try to switch to a whatever the rest of

the world has decided must replace it. This is, I think, the standard

approach many of us often take.

The tmux approach, on the other hand, is what I consider a "vertical"

approach: instead of trying to come to terms with whatever's changed

on the current level, I'm going to retreat down into some

environment that's still under my control.

I faced a very nearly identical (at the above level of abstraction)

situation when I was required to move to a MacOS environment for work

after nearly 15 years of using highly configurable tiling window

managers under GNU/Linux. Besides my ethically-based distaste for

conducting publicly-funded work using non-free software, I also found

it awkward (putting it mildly) to get things done using MacOS's

mouse-centric environment. I too experimented with the horizontal

approach, trying several hackish attempts at getting automated window

management working, but quickly realized that this was made

essentially impossible - Macs are extremely opinionated about how you

use them.

So I took the vertical approach and burrowed down. Instead of tmux,

however, I chose Emacs to be my happy place.

This is less silly than some people - including me in the past -

think. (Here comes the proselytizing...) Emacs handles multiple

windows, and the "eyebrowse" package introduces something similar to

X11 workspaces. Coupled with the fact that Emacs allowed me to create

keybindings using the apple command key, which isn't used anywhere

else, I was able to set up something very closely resembling a tiling

window manager. After learning a bit of elisp, I was able to

implement everything else I was missing from my original wmii/i3

setups - and more. I switched to eshell, got TRAMP configured, and

have happily lived here ever since.

All of this is to say that I completely understand and sympathize with

the feeling that comes with losing access to a cherished method of

interacting with and controlling a computer environment. The

now-useless engrams that now sit like phantom limbs in your brain.

Burrowing down can be, I think, a perfect reaction. Not only does it

solve the immediate problem, it might also help guard against losing

control again in the future - if you choose carefully.

Desktop environments rise and fall, but Emacs and tmux will remain.

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[1] gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2022-11/2022-11-07--wayland-or-tmux.txt