bits 0x2f - Calender Week 47, 2023

# Good Reads

Anatomy of the Linux file system By M. Tim Jones
https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-linux-filesystem/

Development tools for the kernel https://docs.kernel.org/dev-tools/index.html

Core Knowledge That Modern Linux Kernel Developer Should Have by Roman Storozhenko. Some introductory text to kernel development. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/core-knowledge-modern-linux-kernel-developer-should-have

# Learns

Linux kernel coding style my takeaways in: https://shrik3.com/post/cstyle/

GNU GCC RTL(Register Transfer Language)
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/RTL.html

ftrace to debug the kernel. Also with a GUI frontend kernelshark

# What about a DnD style blog theme?

from my post

Despite the fact that the CoE[1] game has been pretty much a scam, I’m kinda tempted to make a (hugo) blog theme with this DnD / Middle-earth / fantasy aesthetic. (Image reading x86 assembly off a parchment scroll!)

Another web design inspiration is the heroworld [2] website, a fan wiki for the heroes of might and magic franchise. (well perhaps every single mmorpg’s website in the early 2010s looks like this.)

Also that I’ve been thinking about ricing my desktop env with the HoMM3 theme, for example a HoMM3 waybar theme. But I’m still in search for some HD materials. Now I’m using HoMM3’s sfx and theme songs as my system notification sound.

[1] https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/35087/CoE-Development-Update-August-2023
[2] http://heroworld.gamerhome.com/

# Navigate and maintain (large) codebase, without “modern techs” (WIP)¹

By “modern techs” I mean, intellisense, LSP, treesitters, “semantic” completion, or pretty much any single feature that someone wants to sell you an IDE/VSCode with.

On navigating a large codebase (Author name unknown)
https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/on-navigating-a-large-codebase/

# Configurability is poison. (WIP)¹

Another thought on my blog theme: how much Configurability is enough Configurability? And how much Configurability becomes bloat?

# Vim modline

/* vim:set sw=8 noet */
# vim: .....

# MISC.

# Some takes on vim config (and plugins)

Why I don’t use xyz
You may notice I’m not including some of the popular plugins in my setup, like treesitter and many other LSP related stuffs.

1. Some of them have bad performance. And
2. I ask myself: do I really need all these fancy stuff at all?

For example, treesitter builds a live AST (abstract syntax tree) for your buffer, and allows for cool stuffs like semantic highlighting, smart refactoring etc. But in bigger source code files TS is barely usable (at least on my old thinkpad).

Another example is the LSP. I have some useful lsp configs here, but I find myself using them less and less. And as it turns out, ctags and grep are more efficient for me. I can’t speak for other developers but to be honest I’m generally NOT SATISFIED with the LSP experience in the vim ecosystem. They are often slow, resource hungry, and broken at worse.

There are other fancy plugins that I don’t use.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying any of these programs is objectively bad. My respects to the devs who make them!

Highlighting everything is Highlighting nothing
How many different things could human brain simultaneously keep track of? Maybe 4?, or maybe 5?. What about using different colors for keywords, structs, statements, parameters, types, members, functions, pointers, operators, strings, and …. ? Trust me, it’s not gonna make it any productive.

(oh. btw, colorblind people exist, like myself)