I was using an LLM to assist when playing with Alacritty and tmux configs. The LLM (gpt-4-turbo) gave some amusing advice

Embrace the Limitation

In some cases, the minor visual imperfections may be something to adjust to. Given tmux’s text-based nature and dependency on terminal emulator behavior, some display quirks can be challenging to eliminate entirely.

While Karabiner/Goku can be a fun way to try and configure my keyboard as an app launcher, I’ve found skhd to be much more straightforward. I’ll probably keep Karabiner for the caps lock to hyper key mapping only for now.

Github Code Search is an indispensable part of my workflow that I don’t think gets mentioned enough. There are so many great projects out there that solve or may help you solve what you are currently working on. I was looking to write a shell script to invoke the caffeinate command on macOS to keep my system awake. The default, this tool runs an blocks forever in the terminal while it does its job. I wanted to manage it in the background. I thought through the beginnings of how I might do that myself. Something like

Fell down the system customization rabbit hole. Looking at switching to Allacrity or kitty as a terminal emulator. Getting goku setup as an app and hotkey launcher on top of Karabiner. Playing with yabai as a window manager. Looking at sketchybar as a custom status bar. Trying to manage it all with nix-darwin and home-manager.

I started to play around a bit with trying to setup a Temporal worker using Deno, but quickly ran into issues, then learned this isn’t currently possible.

I enjoyed reading James’ post on 100 things you can do on your personal website. I like the idea of adding a sparkline and maybe webmentions.

A very timely (for me) article by Hamel about understanding what a language model prompt abstraction library is doing before blindly adopting it. This really aligned with a lot of my own thoughts on the matter, right down to it’s praise of Jason’s instructor library baseline example.

After playing around with home-manager for a bit, I realized what I really wanted was to have nix-darwin manage my system and use my home-manager config as a module. It took a bit of trial and error and searching to figure out how to make this work, but I did eventually find a way. With nix-darwin, I set up my nix and macOS settings. With home-manager, I installed my system packages (configured those) and shell aliases. I still need to do some work to set up git, my shell PS1, and to see if I can configure iTerm from here, but it’s the most promising progress I’ve had so far.

I pivoted to using home-manager using the standalone installation. It seems to provide a reasonable starting point and a found a fair bit of prior art when searching Github, so my hope was there would be good examples to model off of. It took me a frustrating time to realize after running home-manager switch that only some changes took effect immediately. Knowing this probably would have saved me an hour and could have possibly solved a number of my problems from yesterday as well – I don’t have a quick way to check.

Today, was a first day setting up a new computer. I spent most of the time installing applications and building up my setting with declarative configurations. This site has been helpful. I also started this walkthrough for setting up nix on a Mac.

I had to temporarily disable my nix.conf that was generated from the installer then run

nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes run nix-darwin -- switch --flake .

to run the flake.nix file.