Uh, so this is maybe a weird post to put up after not writing anything for a while, but here I am.

I’m a big fan of the Awesome window manager. It’s definitely not for everyone, but I switched to it a while ago and have really become a fan of how it works. I don’t even use most of its features, honestly, but I like that they’re there. And I really appreciate that you can change almost any aspect of how it works. One weakness of it, though, is that it isn’t very well-documented. You kind of have to dig into the internals to figure out how things work, or get lucky and find some internet rando’s blog post telling you how to do the thing you want to do.

In this blog post, I, internet rando, will tell you about one Awesome customization I’ve done, to give each tag (workspace) button a different color.

(By the way, these instructions are written for Awesome 4.2. You might be able to follow along for other versions, though.)

Hi, blog! Been a while, huh? I’ve been busy lately. I’ve been working on a lot of stuff, but haven’t really been posting about it here, because I keep abandoning stuff before I feel like it’s ready to show the world. Well, no longer! Here is a new thing I’ve been working on this past week. I call it Donut Simulator, but that name isn’t really super descriptive. It’s a little population simulator; it randomly spawns a bunch of little circles with brains and they have to try to figure out how to eat food and reproduce. It’s cute and it’s been preventing me from getting actual stuff done because I keep staring at it, which I think is probably a good sign for a project.

I want to talk about programming language syntax tradeoffs. This stuff has probably been said before, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit recently and want to write a blog post about it, because what’s this blog even for anyway.

I was thinking about people’s complaints about various programming languages, and it got me thinking about tradeoffs of features vs. syntax simplicity. What do I mean? Let’s look at some examples.

A couple days ago I posted a little level editor that I made using Javascript and the <canvas> tag. Today I’m going to discuss how I did that. I’m basically discussing my learning experience here. I’m not really sure who is going to find this useful, to be honest, but I’m going for it anyway.

So first we obviously have to set up our canvas. I decided to make mine 256x256 pixels, and divide it into eight tiles per side. This makes the tiles 32x32 pixels.

<canvas width="256" height="256" id="can">you don't support canvas</canvas>

This creates a blank 256x256 canvas with a transparent background whose ID is “can.” The text inside the tag is what shows up to people whose browsers don’t support the tag.