Enable tap to click in i3 WM 🔗
I fiddled around with i3 WM last night because why not, and because if you’re going to crow about how far along Linux is you owe it to yourself to go, if not completely off-road, at least onto the side and back roads of the Linux desktop experience.
It was sort of interesting. Some stuff about it feels a little over-committed to the tiling window manager bit, and maybe some of it is the sort of stuff you just eventually figure out how to deal with, but on some level, even after an hour of learning it by trying to solve configuration problems with it, I was in a small groove.
But wow is it a throwback experience. You just sorta get hucked into this environment that doesn’t care to tell you much and doesn’t do the things you may have come to expect from other environments and you start figuring it out.
Beyond the basic questions, like “how do I launch a browser” or “how do I change my wallpaper,” there are the things that desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, or XFCE have taken as part of their remit, such as exposing friendly interfaces to UI and font scaling for HiDPI displays, setting up natural scrolling or tap-to-click on trackpads, and wiring up your keyboard’s media keys.
i3 is so passionately disinterested in that stuff that I’m going to confess to feeling a certain guilty feeling even thinking about wallpaper or a graphical web browser.
Anyhow, in the process of playing around and trying to figure out how to get natural scrolling and tap-to-click, I found a bunch of “just run xinput and do archaeology” advice before coming across how to do it with xorg.conf.d, in case you’re curious.
The realistic response 🔗
A thing I want to work on:
Understanding when my reaction to something is coming from a place of determining what the “realistic” response is vs. a response informed by a sense of what’s right.
The Beeper vs. Apple saga, of all things, is a vein to mine here.
On the one hand, nothing I’ve read from the Beeper side has caused me to take the’m very seriously. Like, what they’re up to sounds like a sloppy hack I wouldn’t bother with if I’d taken my own time to devise it. Maybe an interesting problem to solve, but I’d expect it to work for a z release or two before some breaking change. I wouldn’t sell it to myself for free, I guess is what I’m saying, let alone $2/month from strangers. And I say that as a relatively happy BlueBubbles user who will stop using BlueBubbles the day I decide to stop using iPhones (which may never happen, but it is not in my mental model of things I want to “just work” to continue to exist in some phantom state of legitimacy on Apple’s platform).
Along those same lines, forget about “some API changes without any particular intention to kill this thing end up killing it,” who in their right mind would expect Apple to not deliberately break this particular hack the second they were made aware of it?
So … there’s the realistic response: “I find this to be of dubious utility, I’d never hang my hat on it, and it is doomed because Apple will crush it with as little thought given to the matter as I give to drawing my next breath.”
But there’s the part of me that is just sort of over “realism” because I’ve been at this a while and do not see in Apple anything I have not seen in every other situation like this that has occurred over the past several decades, same as when AOL did its crackdown on 3rd party AIM clients decades ago, or when Reddit made its own API unaffordable to indy developers in the past year.
The “realistic” response is to say “their platform, their rules,” because that’s the capitalist realist response. But when I’ve encountered the capitalist realist answer elsewhere I have found it profoundly unsatisfying: I never expected better of conservative types, but it has been pretty disappointing to see, over the past several decades, how comfortable liberal/progressive types have become with the privatization of everything and their quiet acceptance of market dynamics as a way to settle issues of human freedom and equity.
So, the thing I want to work on, I guess, is being a little less “realistic” in my reflexive responses. It’s simply not my job to care about Apple’s corporate prerogatives, and it’s not my job to do ideological contortions to rationalize their walled garden, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Cozymas 🔗
Al and I call this time of year “Cozymas.” From the outside, it will look like Christmas: There’s a tree, there are presents. We try to keep the present count down, and we prefer to think of it as a time of year when we take joy being in a warm house and rediscovering small things that feel good.
We landed on this because one of Ben’s early Christmases didn’t go so well: It was overstimulating and plainly too much for him, and it was hard to see that given how much work we’d put in to making it all just so. So we adopted a deliberately low-key take after that. Low-key enough that he complains about our disinterest in doing things up too much.
I’m glad we’re like that, though, because — and it took me years to isolate the feeling — I’m just not a fan of the holiday. I’ll probably never talk in as public a forum as this blog about all the reasons why, but I have them. Even in our insistence that this time of year involve little rushing or stress or concern about perfection, I feel uneasy and out of sync with the world around me. My contribution to post-holiday, back-to-work small talk is usually, “it was quiet, which is how we like it.”
I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of the season however they choose to observe it, but sometimes there are things that we don’t so much get over as much as we learn to live with them, and this time of year is one of those things for me.
I feel lucky to have my home and family, and space to be however I’m going to be about this time of year. I hope you have that space, too.