wingo VS Elm

I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regulard old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.

The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].

I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.

I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

I used Wingo (https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo) for a while and it did the floating/tiling mix pretty well.

I also used StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/) for years, primarily in purely-tiling mode. The killer feature for me was that you (the user) define frames on the desktop, and then windows are placed into frames rather than resizing and re-jiggering everything whenever a new window opens.

Yeah I remember activities from over a decade ago. I don't recall ever being able to get it to work right.

I ended up writing my own WM instead: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

That's why I went and wrote my own window manager that breaks this aspect of EWMH so that workspaces can be changed independently on each head: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo/

Wingo

Switching to a desktop environment is a no-go for me. (I wrote my own WM.) So I'm very likely going to be spending quite a bit of time trying to find a configuration that works for my eyes. I don't mind putting in that time, I'm just hoping that I can find something that works. But others might bounce off. This is actually why I have historically not purchased laptops with HiDPI displays, specifically to avoid dealing with this problem. I made an exception this time because there are so many other great aspects of the laptop.

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/