JNRowe

If you want an out of the box test then playing with river-classic¹ is probably a good place to start. It gives a feel for where you can go, without having to put too much effort in.

For example, it has pluggable layouts where instead of pulling in a lua module(such as awful.layout) in awesome you'll run an external process which handles events. You can even run multiple managers and switch between them with bindings, or write a custom one to scratch that itch. If you're happy with just awful's .suit.tile.right and .suit.max then basically any backend will do.

This is why it feels like a reasonable path off awesomewm to me. I always considered awesomewm to be the WMConstructionKit, and while river changes how you interact there is still a nice route to extensibility. The newer direction even more so than the -classic offshoot.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river-classic

I settled on river¹ after a couple of decades with awesomewm. Tiling and tagging work in a way you'd expect coming from awesomewm, but nothing else does. I made my mind up because having to use workspaces and manual tiling is a far harder sell than implementing the functionality I want on top of a decent base.

If anything it reminds me more of the experience with using awesome v2(before lua); you generate a config file for the base WM, and then build up external tooling to drive it how you see fit. The experience has been quite pleasant, but I do enjoy twiddling.

¹ https://codeberg.org/river/river

Edit: I just checked my dotfiles. Awesome went in on 2008-06-09, and river on 2024-06-30. Happy and largely uneventful two years on river.

There are plenty of examples where menu display and help texts can be toggled.

For example, aptitude has `Aptitude::UI::Menubar-Autohide` and midnight commander has options in the layout menu to disable menu/buttons/etc. That way beginners get to learn through discovery, and may later choose to switch to calling the menu/action with a keypress. Both of those respond to "standard" F1 for help too.

Would I prefer emacs M-x and C-h style interaction in mc? Yeah, probably. I'm used to it everywhere else(such as zsh). However, as a long term user I can execute basically all the functions even though I've long since disabled the buttons, menus and hints.

There is a portable unicode¹ tool available, and it is packaged in a bunch of distributions. I'll spare us the full output, but "unicode a→z" produces something like:

    U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
    UTF-8: 61 UTF-16BE: 0061 Decimal: a Octal: \0141
    a (A)
    Uppercase: 0041
    Category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase); East Asian width: Na (narrow)
    Unicode block: 0000..007F; Basic Latin
    Bidi: L (Left-to-Right)
    Age: Assigned as of Unicode 1.1.0 (June, 1993)
    …
    U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW
    …
    U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z

¹ https://github.com/garabik/unicode

If you want to relive it then simh¹ with mame² might be an option. There appears to be some support for VT11³, along with docs⁴ to use as a starting point.

No, I'm not claiming to have read all one hundred pages already. However, from what I have read I'd love to see a functional demo.

¹ https://simh.trailing-edge.com/

² https://www.mamedev.org/

³ https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/PDP11/pdp11_vt.c

⁴ https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MAME_and_SIMH