config VS tab-rs

I don‘t understand why HOCON (https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md) isn‘t used more often (at least for configuration use cases). It‘s a superset of JSON, has comments, multiline strings, optional quotes, replacement syntax. We use it at many places, and it‘s as nice at it can get.

HOCON is a great human-readable alternative to JSON. It's a superset of JSON with lots of cool features that make it both more readable and easier to use.

Here's a rundown of HOCON's main features: https://github.com/lightbend/config#features-of-hocon

"Typesafe Config" is the library generally used to read configuration files in HOCON format, which this library introduced. It's commonly used in essentially OOP/imperative Scala contexts, including Akka and its ecosystem.

Interesting!

For my own servers I use an internal tool that integrates apps with systemd. You point it at the output of your build system and a config file, and it produces a deb that contains systemd unit files and which registers/starts the server on install/reboot/upgrade, as a regular debian package would. Then it uploads it to the server via sftp and installs it using apt, so dependencies are resolved. As part of the build process it can download and bundle language runtimes (I use it with a JVM), it scans native binaries to find packages that the app should depend on, and you can define your config including package metadata like dependencies and systemd units using the HOCON language [1].

Upshot is you can go from a Gradle or Maven build to a running server with a few lines of config. Oh and it can build debs from any OS, so you can push from macOS and Windows too. If your server needs to depend on e.g. Postgres, you just add that dependency in your config and it'll be up and running after the push.

It also has features to turn on DynamicUser and other sandboxing features. I think I'll experiment with socket activation next, and then bundled BorgBackup.

Net/net it's pretty nice. I haven't tried with containers because many language ecosystems don't seem to really need them for many use cases. If your build tool knows how to download your language runtime and bundle it sans container by just setting up paths correctly, then going without means you can rely on your Linux distribution to keep things up to date with security patches in the background, it means networking works as you'd expect (no accidentally opened firewall ports!) and so on. SystemD knows how to configure resource isolation/cgroups and kernel sandboxing, so if you need those you can just write that into your build config and it's done. Or not, as you wish.

With a deployment tool to automate builds/pushes, systemd to supervise processes and a big beefy dedicated machine to let you scale up, I wonder how much value the container part is really still providing if you don't need the full functionality of Kubernetes.

[1] https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md

Other similar standards: TOML, HOCON

I've also used HOCON pretty extensively for config, and it is better than both YAML and JSON for config with moderate to high complexity.

If you want to read some code, my project is tab-rs.

I myself use the many (alacritty) terminals + tiling WM solution at the moment (switching between i3wm and LeftWM) but it doesn't feel optimal. I always though tmux looked too involved to learn so I've been on the lookout for alternatives such as Wezterm (a terminal with built-in multiplexing), tab (a command line controlled multiplexer) and now zellij.

Plus a lot of cleanup in the tab-pty-process crate. It now exposes an interface similar to portable-pty, but with non-blocking file handles.

I ended up writing a terminal multiplexer because screen and tmux were too complicated to use. It has a built in fuzzy finder, stateless navigation, and YAML configs for persistent sessions: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/

The way I typically unify messages is define an enum, and map/merge channel receivers. tokio-stream would probably work with these examples. Here's an example from a fuzzy-finder implementation: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/blob/main/tab-command/src/service/terminal/fuzzy.rs#L332

Really nice cheat-sheet write up on screen & tmux & byobu.

Also worth checking out tabs-rs[1] which seems very well reviewed & recent.

Personally, I am a huge fan of dtach[2][3], which isn't a multiplexer, just a detachable proxier of terminal sessions. This let's me run a persistent vim session that I can reconnect to, and vim has however many terminals I need open in it. Vim does my multiplexing, dtach just allows me to make vim persistent. Very glad to have re-discovered dtach, to enable this workflow.

Notably dtach is very lightweight. Unlike tmux, it is not a virtual terminal. Upon reconnect to my vim session, I issue a control-l to refresh the screen. Dtach hasn't retained the screen state, isn't translating between terminfos. The one thing that can go wrong here is connecting from different terminals- few programs have a way to update the TERM setting once the program has launched.

[1] https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs

[2] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dtach

The nice thing about that is that many other tools can work too. Someone using direnv can set properties that would be available in the hurl script. Likewise, someone using tab could have environment variables defined for their active tab that could be used. If you invent your own notion of an environment, you lose interop with a lot of other tools that target the standard environment.

Are you running v0.5.3? I just released a fix for a Kakoune issue that was caused by add-highlighter global/ number-lines -relative in kakrc. It sounds similar to what you described.

There are also some crazy ANSI sequences that cause the terminal emulator to write stdin - so applications can query the terminal state. Crazy stuff can happen when those sequences are copied from the scrollback buffer (which is why tab now filters them out).