Re: wayland or tmux
===================

I know I do a lot of Emacs proselytizing on this phlog, and I'm sure
the vanishingly small number of people who read my stuff are sick of
it, but I read this post on uninformative.de [1] and it struck such a
chord of familiarity that I can't hold myself back. :) 

The post describes how the author, frustrated with the declining
support for X11, is hunting for new ways to continue remaining in
control of their computer.  Not control in the philosophical free
software is freedom sense (although this is obviously of paramount
importance!) but in the very pragmatic and somewhat orthogonal sense
of being _easily_ able to completely customize their interaction with
their computer that was previously afforded by the relative ease of
writing X11 window managers.

Their proposed solutions are (a) trying to become productive with
Wayland, and (b) doubling down on tmux.

The Wayland approach to this kind of problem is what I think of as a
"horizontal" approach: my current (ideal) interaction "shell" is being
deprecated, hence I'm going to try to switch to a whatever the rest of
the world has decided must replace it.  This is, I think, the standard
approach many of us often take.

The tmux approach, on the other hand, is what I consider a "vertical"
approach: instead of trying to come to terms with whatever's changed
on the current level, I'm going to retreat *down* into some
environment that's still under my control.

I faced a very nearly identical (at the above level of abstraction)
situation when I was required to move to a MacOS environment for work
after nearly 15 years of using highly configurable tiling window
managers under GNU/Linux. Besides my ethically-based distaste for
conducting publicly-funded work using non-free software, I also found
it awkward (putting it mildly) to get things done using MacOS's
mouse-centric environment.  I too experimented with the horizontal
approach, trying several hackish attempts at getting automated window
management working, but quickly realized that this was made
essentially impossible - Macs are extremely opinionated about how you
use them.

So I took the vertical approach and burrowed *down*. Instead of tmux,
however, I chose Emacs to be my happy place.

This is less silly than some people - including me in the past -
think. (Here comes the proselytizing...) Emacs handles multiple
windows, and the "eyebrowse" package introduces something similar to
X11 workspaces.  Coupled with the fact that Emacs allowed me to create
keybindings using the apple command key, which isn't used anywhere
else, I was able to set up something very closely resembling a tiling
window manager.  After learning a bit of elisp, I was able to
implement everything else I was missing from my original wmii/i3
setups - and more.  I switched to eshell, got TRAMP configured, and
have happily lived here ever since.

All of this is to say that I completely understand and sympathize with
the feeling that comes with losing access to a cherished method of
interacting with and controlling a computer environment.  The
now-useless engrams that now sit like phantom limbs in your brain.

Burrowing down can be, I think, a perfect reaction. Not only does it
solve the immediate problem, it might also help guard against losing
control again in the future - if you choose carefully.

Desktop environments rise and fall, but Emacs and tmux will remain.

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[1] gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2022-11/2022-11-07--wayland-or-tmux.txt

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