atuin VS greenfield

I've heard good things about atuin

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

The shell history autocomplete seems to be better than the one that comes with Oh My Zsh.

Atuin is lovely, although I found some of its defaults pretty annoying until I changed them:

- It turns out I basically never want fuzzy search through my command history, and certainly not by default. I gave it a try for a couple weeks but it was very frustrating to be searching for a particular command, type in the exact prefix, and have the thing I was looking for hidden among hundreds of irrelevant entries. Solution: search_mode = "fulltext" in Atuin's config.toml

- Having a full screen pop-up appear whenever I hit up was really jarring, especially since I have a habit of hitting up a few times when I'm at the command line thinking of what I need to do next, to sort of refresh my memory on what I was just doing; the popup very effectively destroyed that chain of thought. Solution: eval "$(atuin init bash --disable-up-arrow)" in .bashrc

These are pretty minor issues and it's possible my preferences are just different from most!

Atuin now works really nicely for me. My only outstanding issues are:

- Under mosh the UI ends up corrupting the screen; apparently this is really more of a mosh bug (no alternate screen support) and you can work around it by having tmux/screen running: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/1324

- I still don't have a great model in my head of how sync works and find myself occasionally force-syncing across a few systems until I convince myself everything is in the same state.

- It would be nice to have some kind of settings sync so I don't have to make the config changes mentioned above on 10 different systems. Surprisingly I don't see a feature request for this yet so maybe I'll go open one...

Anyway I don't want these issues to stop people from trying Atuin – it's a really nice piece of software. I almost never make changes to the default environment so I consider it a testament to how useful it is that I've added it to all the systems I use regularly!

They recently added sqlite backed history. You can also use atuin[1] for more advanced usecases.

[1]: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

I was studying the Atuin crate, and I noticed the following pattern:

You might be interested in https://github.com/ellie/atuin

> Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands.

There's Greenfield, an HTML5 Wayland compositor. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

There's some fancy bridging modes to run apps in a browser, but the author has also been working on a way to make wasm Wayland apps run directly in the browser tol.

Do any GUI frameworks support WASM?

I've been looking for a way to run GUI applications remotely for a while, specifically on a wlroots compositor. Projects like this (maybe one day) and https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield are interesting since they essentially make access universally accessible.

Palm Pre's webOS (2009) is the most famous. After an acquisition by HP (2010-2013), it was acquired by LG's (with patents going to Qualcomm).

Before that was a neat Linux project Pyrodesktop (2007) which was an x11 window manager using Firefox guts to render. There was also a trend of trying to mate Javascript technologies to gnome back then, with efforts like gjs seeing some adoption. I don't know how popular it is, but a spinoff of css was/is used for styling in GNOME for a while.

These days there's tons of web desktop projects. https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops . Only sort of in the spirit but i quite adore Greenfield, an html5 Wayland desktop/compositor. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

The network is thr computer, yay!

Lower level, but there's also a Wayland compositor being written for the web. Many caveats apply, different effort, but also interesting, https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

> A Wayland-style compositor, on the other hand, seems to be a much higher barrier to entry. ... I don't recall ever seeing "You have to use TWM because AfterStep won't work with your Trident 9440 video card" back in 1998.

All in all, the basics of Wayland are a pretty tight package. https://wayland-book.com/ goes through the pieces, and it's not a super thick read. The system of passing around surfaces is comprehensible, tight, makes sense, and there is very little fluff or barriers here, imo.

Wayland has a common core, but absolutely I'd grant that the various protocols do indeed make it a much less tightly coupled thing, with different compositors having different sets of protocols they support. So yes, some apps that require advanced capabilities run much better in some compositors than others; the compositor choice matters. Sometimes there are multiple competing protocols for the same feature-sets, but usually/historically, wayland-protocols hammers stuff out reasonably quickly & most of this is a matter of time.

Still, this is often easier than the past, where apps would have to each test for extensions & have various fast/regular/fallback codepaths depending on available extensions; not necessarily a hindrance to the window-manager, but a bundle of complexity for everyone else trying to use X11 adequately. The Wayland common primitives, on the other hand, are fairly universally performant & well chosen.

In terms of complexity for window-manager/compositor, the situation is not unlike X11 itself, where yes, a simple window manager (or compositor) is possible to spin up relatively quickly, but where there is a sea of different standards to implement to do a good job. Window manager hints, extended window manager hints, and a plethora of other standards existed around X11 that were up to the window-manager to tackle, and implementing each of those took a lot of time too, if you wanted good support for all apps. Different Wayland compositors also have different support for different protocols, and those are a bit deeper rooted, less superficial than many of the X11 hints (which, if ignored, were less likely to impede use), but the idea is the same: real support to really be decent took work in X11, and it takes work in Wayland.

Where I disagree highly is calling out the hardware here. Wayland is closely tied to kernel fundamentals; any reasonably supported video card will perform adequately under any compositor. (Generally. Certainly some compositors could demand higher standards, such as some of the experimental compositors requiring Vulkan, but generally compositors have very similar, very common requirements.)

> I wonder if it would have made more sense to go with a paired approach-- a single master compositor implementation, with the complicated and more hardware-sensitive stuff involved, and a pluggable window manager that spoke to it.

I like where we are, where there are various toolkits/libraries for implementing. Wlroots, which underpins chiefly Sway (the i3 replacement), has given rise to a variety of other compositors, spanning the gamut from quick/fast/experimental to rich/deep/powerful. libwayland still defines some core ideas, if not implementations. Weston is still available as a reference, although yes it's designed (more or less) to be forked & enhanced, not built to be preserved & built (extensibly) on top of. Wlroots & other alternative toolkits fill this need, & provide a diversity of ideas for how we might get going. Projects like Greenfield, the HTML5 compositor (https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield) demonstrate the diversity we get from not having a single common core technology, are possible because of this belief in protocol & standards over implementations, eased though implementations might be from promoting something like Weston to the one-and-only implementation.

> The whole "nVidia works, but only with the GNOME compositor" sort of stuff reads as a sign that there's way too much involved in there.

We can't look at a anti-plays-well-with-others entity like Nvidia to assess what is/isn't a good idea. Nvidia spent nearly a decade stomping their feet & demanding only their way was ok. The fact that OpenGL itself, what the rock their obstinacy was built around, is somewhat on the way out further should stress how foolish & self-centered this vendor has been. This discompatibility indicates nothing, is no sign, except an indicator of what kind of a company Nvidia is/was (one that obstructed any implementations of well known & common kernel constructs).

Now consider something like greenfield, a wayland compositor that runs on the browser.