motidu day 01: alpine, wayland, vim

tldr:

installed alpine linux

using the sway window manager

using the sakura terminal emulator

using the amfora gemini client

using vim

email not set up properly yet

motidu is an acronym for "month of things i don't use". i'm going to post regular updates about it to encourage myself. not daily updates, but updates whenever something interesting strikes me.

alpine and wayland

i installed alpine this morning. it's been a while since i moved to another distro, but it didn't take long and the install was surprisingly clean!

getting sway up and running was a breeze, as well, so i'm glad for that! looking around for wayland-compatible terminal emulators, i found 'sakura', which is super cute and actually works, so i'm happy for that!

text editing

i don't have nano or emacs installed, to help deter me from using them. i don't know how often i sub-consciously tried to edit a file with nano now, haha!

i edit everything in vim. it works. i want to try using the linux port of plan9's acme editor, but i'll wait a bit on that. i don't have a mouse attached to this machine, and i hear acme is pretty mouse-oriented. sounds super fun, though!

in the future i want to try a language server protocol, but i'll wait until i get the basics of vim down properly!

gemini client

i usually use elpher for my gemini client, so without emacs i had to go hiking for another. i like gmni but it's too bare and i'm spoiled, so i tried amfora and oh holy nuts amfora is nice! it has vim-style keybindings, too, to help me practice my vim mindset.

amfora has a wiki on gemini!

setting up email

as for email, i'm having a hard time configuring things properly. here on tilde.pink we don't need to worry about mail retreival, but i do like just being able to use the 'mail' command to see if there are any new messages. i want to do something like that now. something small. something bite-sized...

fetchmail is giving me some problems. movemail is, too, strangely. maybe i'll try something less popular like getmail or uh... whatever else there is out there!

as for clients, yeah i do like the 'mail' command, and i'm not a huge mutt fan, but i'll hop around and see what's out there! my only requirements so far are:

mbox support, for rmail compatibility.

well yeah that's about it, actually.

i don't care too much about being able to parse html emails. my friends don't send me html emails, anyway!

boy, email is hard to do. why is email so hard? i wish it were more like xmpp, where you just need to tell the client what server you're on! oh man, xmpp is nice that way. you don't have to worry about stuff like "my xmpp receiving program and my xmpp storing program and my xmpp sorting program and my xmpp parsing program and my xmpp viewing program are all using conflicting standards!", because xmpp doesn't work that way! but email does.

this is becoming less of a "what i've learnt" post and more of a rantpost, so i'll just stop talking about email now, haha!

conclusion

hmmm, that's about it, really! if i ever get my mail system configured to be super comf, i'll write a tutorial about it here on gemini!

march 9, 2021