Oh, I thought you meant one of those file tree sidebars was white.

Does the file picker look somewhat like this?

Then it’s using the KDE file picker. I believe, it should be possible to make it use the GTK file picker, by configuring the “desktop portal” correctly.
Here is a guide for doing the reverse of what you need (GTK application in KDE Plasma): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and_GTK_applications#Consistent_file_dialog_under_KDE_Plasma
Maybe you can do the steps the other way around or it helps you find a better guide…

And no problem. 🙂

Oh, good question, how to make Kate work well under GNOME. I have to admit, I use it under KDE, so never really dealt with the theming. But I believe, “Tokyo Night” is only the editor theme. Can you select a different Window Color scheme in the menubar under Settings?

what’s the difference between what looks like three different folder tree buttons (Document seems to only show one file, and then Project and File Browser plugin both show the full tree of the folder you have opened)?

• “Documents” only shows your currently open tabs. To be honest, I never quite figured out what it’s good for, but I think it makes more sense, if you use Kate for authoring texts or such. I normally disable it in the settings, under Plugins → Documents Tree.
• “Filesystem” is kind of like a mini-file-manager. You can navigate to any directory you want in there, or have it always show the current folder of the document you have currently open. But it isn’t aware of what a repository is, so depending on how you open Kate, it may not show the right folder and jumping to the current document’s folder will put you into a sub-directory of your repository. As I said above, I also mostly keep that one disabled these days, although I can see it being useful.
• “Projects” is aware of Git. It always shows the current repository folder, if you are in one, expanding the file tree from there. It hides files listed in .gitignore. And yeah, in my opinion just what you want to use for programming.

And is there an equivalent for the “Code Runner” plugin? If not, I guess I could always just run “python filename.py”, but a play/run button would be nice.

There is a plugin called “Build & Run”, which you can enable and which might do what you’re looking for. I typically prefer running from the terminal, so I can’t say too much about it…

It does have some quirks. I feel like there’s one workflow that works really well, which is the workflow of the single core maintainer, and whenever you deviate from that, then yeah, features may be missing that you’d expect or things just don’t work as smoothly.

But it has gotten some cool upgrades in recent years, like LSP support has basically transformed it into a mini-IDE and when you press Ctrl+Alt+i, you get a text search across all menu entries.
There’s probably more things that I’m forgetting, but the quirkiness also got reduced quite a bit. Like, I would always use the File System Browser plugin, because it was the only one that worked well enough for what I wanted, and I just dealt with manually navigating into each project directory. Nowadays, I prefer the Project plugin, because that now works smoothly enough for that same purpose.
It’s still a bit weird that I can’t drag-and-drop files from Project plugin’s file tree, but I just click “Open Containing Folder” in the context menu and then do it in my file manager, so it isn’t a huge deal…

I use Kate, which meets most of your requirements, except that it doesn’t have a huge plugin ecosystem.

https://kate-editor.org/

From what I’ve heard, a big reason is that Microsoft keeps essential language support plugins proprietary. If your fork would become too successful, Microsoft could make more plugins proprietary or somehow limit access to their plugin ecosystem.

I guess, I should throw in that there is Eclipse Theia, which tries to establish an own plugin ecosystem: https://theia-ide.org/

Typically, touchpad gestures (particularly multi-touch gestures) will work better on Wayland, because it has libinput.

I’m neither Scottish nor ultra-deeply embedded into the trans community, so I doubt I would’ve heard of politician statements or the like. But yeah, I do think I would’ve heard of it, if the ruling got repealed, and I did not hear of that, unfortunately.

I guess, the main aftermath is that it got reported pretty much globally, because it is clever and there are boobs involved, so even clickbait newspapers can print that. Well, and hopefully it got people talking and reevaluating their preconceptions.

Well, I guess, then don’t show it to them, but to all the bystanders that haven’t thought about this issue enough and therefore let the bullies do whatever they want. We need them on the side of reason to prevent the bullies from hijacking democracies.

It has been done before, with both kinds of news coverage, too:

• With nipples: https://snackmag.co.uk/trans-women-protest-topless-outside-scottish-parliament
• Without: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/05/17/scottish-parliament-holyrood-trans-protest-supreme-court/

Don’t let that discourage you, though. Showing the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd that their “facts” are in fact just feelings, is always worthwhile.

I think, part of the “problem” is that most of their training data is formal language. They’ll have much less data from private chats and such.

I mean, you should do general logging either way, since you won’t have a debugger attached when running in production. And then you can typically scroll back in the logs, too, when the debugger has paused execution.

What this meme is talking about, is adding ad-hoc logs to narrow down where an error occurs while developing. So, bullshit logs like console.log("1"), followed by a line of potentially bad code and then console.log("2”). Log lines which you’ll remove again when you’re done debugging…

I figured, I’d involuntarily sign up for counter suggestions by posting this. 😅

Using lib.escape is a good idea, thanks.

But yeah, basically I want to configure Alacritty and I’m using the respective home-manager module.
Even more specifically, I want to pass stuff, including a regex, into the settings parameter, which more-or-less just takes the Nix expression that I shove in and then outputs it as TOML on disk.

As for how I would’ve liked this to work:

• Use ''doubled single-quotes'' in Nix to not need escaping.
• Use 'single-quotes' in TOML to not need escaping: https://toml.io/en/v1.0.0#string%3A~%3Atext=single+quotes

But the TOML is templated with "double-quotes", so I do need to escape the regex after all.

I did just try to understand how the Alacritty module does the templating and found this gem:

# TODO: why is this needed? Is there a better way to retain escape sequences?
"substituteInPlace $out --replace-quiet '\\\\' '\\'"

Source

So, that doesn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence. 🙃

But yeah, it’s working now without me having to write a whole bunch of backslashes, so that’s good enough in my book.

Growth=good is also a sentiment for whole markets.

In a market where new customers start buying the products every day (growth market), e.g. the smartphone market 20 years ago, you can generally just come up with new products and someone will buy them, if they’re good.

On the other hand, in a market where customers only replace their old products as needed (market saturation), e.g. basically the smartphone market of today, things are much more tight for companies. They have to primarily be more cost-efficient than their competitors in order to survive.

I usually see PuppyLinux recommended for 32-bit systems: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
There’s multiple flavors of it, including one based on Debian.

For headless usage, there might be other alternatives, though…

I guess, there’s technically nothing which dictates that a debugger has to work by stepping through a program. It could also present you some diagram of variable values changing over time. But yeah, gonna be hard to find a more useful representation than those values being interleaved with your logs, at least for most applications. I have heard of more advanced debuggers being used in gamedev, which makes sense, since logs aren’t nearly as useful there.

But yeah, given that most people think of the stepping debuggers, them being the default advice does feel emblematic of our industry still shying away from concurrency.

This meme brought to you by me trying to pass a regex from Nix into a TOML, which is certainly not the worst backslash orgy I’ve seen, but tragic in its own right. Both Nix and TOML have a way to specify raw strings, which do not need escaping. But Nix uses a normal string when passing into TOML, so I do have to escape anyways. 🫠

My regex also contains a double-quote, which was just guesswork as to how many backslashes I need there.

Yeah, it’s explicitly built to run in a browser: https://agama-project.github.io/

I guess, the idea is mainly that you can also perform the installation over the network. I can imagine this being quite cool for setting up a Raspberry Pi or similar.

Had stinky feet throughout my whole adulthood. Always wore padded shoes with a fake leather cover, like every shoe shop throws at you with promises of them being breathable.

Then recently bought shoes with canvas for the cover material and they single-handedly solved the problem. My feet are not always hot anymore, because I am just wearing two pieces of cloth over them (canvas+socks) rather than thick padding. And they are actually breathable, too, allowing sweat to dissipate pretty quickly.

And if I do sweat more in the summer and they start to smell, I can chuck them into the washing machine¹ to undo that entirely.

At the risk of wholly explaining what a cloth is, I guess, I should also mention that moisture does not just go out of the shoes more easily, but obviously also into them. So, they’re not as great of a choice for rainy days. But yeah, that tradeoff is definitely worth it for me.

¹) The shoes I got actually recommend putting them into the washing machine. Might not be a good idea with other canvas shoes.

There’s already alternative implementations, with somewhat different featuresets:

• Akkoma (more minimalist than Mastodon; Elixir in the backend): https://akkoma.social/
• Misskey (much more feature-rich than Mastodon; Typescript in the backend; extremely Japanese): https://misskey-hub.net/en/

Having said that, frankly, I doubt that the Ruby ecosystem will fall apart from this. There’s too many non-volunteers whose wage depends on Ruby to keep going…