— Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about… <Multi_key>.

— <Multi_key>?

— Yeah.

— Let me tell you about <Multi_key>….

"<Multi_key> is undefined"

A bit out of order, but things tangle, a problem I’m having on my Guix machine with Emacs.

It’s connected with the Lucid toolkit¹, but only in an indirect causal sort of way:— I’m using the standard GTK3 toolkit on this particular build of Emacs on Guix. (A custom build, admittedly, which might be part of the issue, but where exactly, I’m not sure.) I’ll probably say some other things connected to this later, but for the moment forget about Lucid. It’s just a GTK3 toolkit build.²

So, skipping over large swathes of story, I’ve got a seemingly mostly-functioning build of Emacs 30.0.93 running on my Guix laptop (which finally has a functioning StumpWM environment again), and I go to type æ or þ or á or λ or something using Right_Alt as a compose key (defined by xmodmap) and Emacs, without blinking an eye, flashes at me, saying "<Multi_key> is undefined".

I try various things to do with XIM and environment variables³ and none of it works. I finally come across a post on a FreeBSD bugs tracker⁴ which suggests a possible fix of setting (setq x-gtk-use-native-input 't).

And, though it feels like a hack for something that’s gone wrong in a deeper way, it seems to work, and I can type ɔ and Þ and γ and so on.

But then I’m reading a PDF (using PDF Tools) and I go to page back up to read an earlier bit by pressing Shift and SPACE and I find myself paging down to the end of the document instead.

The “native input” method apparently won’t recognise Shft+SPACE, but just sees SPACE and so pages down.

So if x-gtk-use-native-input is nil, I can’t use the compose key in Emacs, and if it’s t then I can’t scroll properly in PDFs.

I thought vaguely about writing a macro to process the ‘kragen’ XCompose definitions into a bunch of things of the form:

(define-key global-map [(Multi_key) (s) (s)] (lambda ()
                                                   (interactive)
                                                 (insert 223)))

and then have my init.el load the whole thing in. But I don’t think that would quite work anyway, since sometimes I want to say insert a special character as part of a search and not insert it into a text buffer.

So I came up with a different stupid solution. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least somewhat working while I try to figure out what went wrong in the first place.

Here it is:

(when (equal (system-name) "guix-laptop")
  ;; on this Guix/StumpWM machine's Emacs, xcompose doesn't work:
  ;; Emacs says "I don't know what <Multi_key> means"
  ;; (well, it actually says "<Multi_key> is undefined").
  ;; As per https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=278167
  ;; we can 'fix' this if we set (setq x-gtk-use-native-input 't).
  ;; Then xcompose will will work again ... but now Shift-SPACE won't

  ;; So...

  (setq x-gtk-use-native-input 'nil) ;; make sure Shift-SPACE works...

  ;; So, Emacs says "<Multi_key> is undefined".
  ;; Well, then, we can define it.
  ;; Namely as a function which sets `x-gtk-use-native-input' to `t',
  ;; and then calls an external shell-command to input <Multi_key>
  ;; (so that it acts like Right_Alt was pressed), and then sets a timer running
  ;; that turns `x-gtk-use-native-input' to `nil' after 10 seconds
  ;; (so that Shift-SPACE will work again).

  (defun bms/xinput-hack ()
    (interactive)
    ;; stop the timer if there is one running already:
    (when bms/xinput-timer-running
      (cancel-timer bms/xinput-timer-running))
    ;; set the input method to allow xcompose to work:
    (setq x-gtk-use-native-input 't)
    ;; must have `xdotool' installed:
    (shell-command "xdotool key Multi_key")
    ;; record the name of the timer to stop it,
    ;; so we don't end up with tonnes of timers somehow
    (setq bms/xinput-timer-running
          (run-at-time 10 nil
          ;; this sets it for 10 secs; maybe could be shorter,
          ;; but you don't want it turning off in the middle of sequences
                       (lambda ()
                         (setq x-gtk-use-native-input 'nil)))))

  ;; And then we bind <Multi_key> to that function.
  ;; (There, now it's not undefined anymore.)

  (define-key global-map (kbd "<Multi_key>") #'bms/xinput-hack))
  ;; A stupid solution to a stupid problem.

First, the stock configuration has a horrible touchpad - which shouldn’t matter if you don’t use the touchpad, but the horribleness of it is that the physical buttons that should be on the top of the touchpad, and are on the touchpads of models preceding and following the **40 line, are not there. But one can replace it, and so I did.

The T440p is nice in that servicing the fan and other internals of the machine is a relatively easy affair compared to say an X230. Just undo two screws on the bottom of the laptop and slide off the back panel, and you have access to memory, drives, the CPU, and so on. And so swapping in a different CPU was really easy and painless.

On the other hand, changing the touchpad was a very involved affair. But it can be done.

However, still the mouse-cursor experience for the machine continued to be horrible. Firstly, there was significant “drift” of the TrackPoint. I.e., even once pressure is released, it keeps moving, for a long time.

However, this ends up being solvable via

sudo -s echo  'ACTION=="add",SUBSYSTEM=="input",ATTR{name}=="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint",ATTR{device/drift_time}="30"'  > /etc/udev/rules.d/10-trackpoint.rules

(If you’re trying to do this in Guix, something like:

(define %trackpoint-drift-rule
  (udev-rule
    "10-trackpoint.rules"
    (string-append "ACTION==\"add\",SUBSYSTEM==\"input\",ATTR{name}==\"TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint\",ATTR{device/drift_time}=\"25\""))

(define %my-desktop-services
   (cons (udev-rules-service 'trackpoint-drift %trackpoint-drift-rule)
         (modify-services %desktop-services
                          ....) ; other modifications here
         ))

(operating-system
  ....
  (services
    (append
     (list
      (service openssh-service-type)
      (service cups-service-type)
      (service nix-service-type)
      ....)
     %my-desktop-services))
  ....)

instead.)

But, unfortunately, this doesn’t solve what is actually the most horrible issue: the mouse cursor sometimes, when in use, just teleports around the edges of the screen and starts randomly clicking on things.

I finally turned up some discussion of this issue (though not for the T440p specifically) at: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=209167 (The discussion suggests that it should somehow be solved in the kernel, but that is not my experience, even running kernel 5.17.13.)

And found that adding psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel arguments and disabling the touchpad in the stock BIOS solves the “possessed mouse cursor” issue. For better or worse, it seem to make the TrackPoint be detected as a generic PS/2 mouse. Which means that drift_time can no longer be set, and I do get a little bit of drift from time to time, but it’s not too bad and certainly is far less maddening than the “possessed mouse cursor” behaviour.

For Guix, the way to implement this is something along the lines of:

(operating-system
 ...
 (kernel-arguments (cons* "modprobe.blacklist=pcspkr,snd_pcsp" "psmouse.proto=imps" "acpi_osi=Linux" %default-kernel-arguments))
 ...)

(The other kernel arguments are simply the other ones I use, and are not directly connected with this issue.)

Depending on the model of ThinkPad and/or the environment, using psmouse.proto=bare instead may work better (see discussion at: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/v7vn0o/thinkpad_t440p_trackpoint_occasionally_going_crazy/icjkk0o/ ).

So, perhaps not an entirely satisfactory solution, this impish exorcism, but better than alternatives.

Maze no. 1

There may (likely is) some way of programmatically setting the X Windows PATH variable in Guix System (née GuixSD) via the base configuration (e.g. config.scm), but I haven’t been able to uncover anything that works. This is relevant for being able to use locally installed static binaries or local shell scripts via the window manager.

As a window-manager-specific workaround, in StumpWM, one can programmatically set PATH variables via (setf (getenv "VARIABLE_NAME") "variable-value"). Thus, if you store local static binaries and shell scripts in ~/bin, the following (which you could include in StumpWM’s init.lisp) will add that to your PATH variable:

(setf (getenv "PATH") (concat "/home/YOURUSERNAME/bin:" (getenv "PATH")))

I use this with a static Haskell binary greenclip, which adds clipboard functionality to rofi, and with shell scripts that give “pretty names” to Flatpak run commands.

For example, the literate/natural-language-based programming interactive fiction design language Inform7 (which is due to be open-sourced sometime this year) is now conveniently available as a Flatpak. But the run command after installing is flatpak run com.inform7.IDE, which is non-ideal. So I made a simple shell script named inform7 placed in ~/bin:

#!/bin/sh
flatpak run com.inform7.IDE

Maze no. 2

Nix can be installed as a standalone package manage on top of other distros, including Guix System, which is useful for be able to obtain software currently lacking in Guix System (including, ironically, Hugo, used by this blog, which is present in Nix). Packages available in Nix but not in Guix include Gargoyle, a very nice interactive fiction front-end client that supports a number of different backends, including Frotz and Glulxe. One of the benefits of Gargoyle is that it “cares about typography”. However, Nix applications by default seem to have trouble finding/seeing fonts, including system fonts, local fonts, and even fonts installed via Nix.

This can be fixed by (1) setting the FONTCONFIG_PATH and FONTCONFIG_FILE, e.g. in StumpWM this can be done with:

(setf (getenv "FONTCONFIG_PATH") "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.config/fontconfig/")
(setf (getenv "FONTCONFIG_FILE") "fonts.conf")

And (2) forcing Nix to look in the right places by manual specification in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, adding right before the final </fontconfig> (as appropriate):

<cachedir prefix="xdg">fontconfig</cachedir>
<dir>/home/YOURUSERNAME/.local/share/fonts/</dir>
<dir>/home/YOURUSERNAME/.nix-profile/share/fonts/</dir>
<dir>/home/YOURUSERNAME/.guix-profile/share/fonts/</dir>
<dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>

And regenerating the font cache (via fc-cache -fv) [possibly you may need to install Nix’s fontconfig package].

Fortunately, some years ago, Matthew Russotto created Confusion, “a MDL interpreter which works just well enough to play the original Zork all the way through” and runs on Linux/Unix and presumably macOS. I’d tried to install this from Arch’s AUR a couple of years ago, without any luck. Inspecting the package build, the AUR Confusion tries to get around errors by using an ancient version of gcc. I found that a few fairly trivial fixes were enough to get it to compile with a recent version of gcc, and so was finally able to try the original Zork:

The most fun I always had in text adventures was exploring, and I’ve always found Infocom’s various “time-limit” elements (batteries running out, health deteriorating, &c.) somewhat irritating. I remembered that there’s a torch in Zork I, and that is also true in the original Zork, and I managed to obtain it early on so as to save my (trusty brass) lamp’s batteries. I then cheated somewhat wildly (though, to be fair, a lot of the puzzles I had figured out once upon a time in Zork I or Zork II; and the bank puzzle and some of the others I wouldn’t have patience for anymore).

The original code has some bugs in it which made things more interesting.

Narrow Ledge
You are on a narrow ledge overlooking the inside of an old dormant
volcano.  This ledge appears to be about in the middle between the
floor below and the rim above. There is an exit here to the south.
There is a very large and extremely heavy wicker basket with a cloth
bag here. Inside the basket is a metal receptacle of some kind.
Attached to the basket on the outside is a piece of wire.
The basket contains:
 A cloth bag
 A braided wire
 A receptacle
 The receptacle contains:
  A newspaper
 A blue label
There is a small hook attached to the rock here.

> untie braided wire from hook

 *ERROR*
 "FIRST-ARG-WRONG-TYPE"
 "First arg to NTH must be structured"
LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 2 PROCESS 1
Atom REP has neither LVAL nor GVAL

I had a similar issue involving the result of a disagreement with a suspicious-looking individual holding a bag. It turns out (thanks to Matthew Russotto for the following information) that this has to do with issues in saving and restoring files, and (failure of) either properly recording or decoding certain values. The balloon issue has to do with a record about the object burning in the receptacle. It is saved as BINF!-FLAG, which should be a boolean-type flag, but at some point it became an object (recording what is burning) and apparently isn’t decoded properly on a restore. Saving-and-restoring during a battle with the suspicious-looking individual produces a similar error to the balloon-burnable error, due to the THIEF-ENGROSSED!-FLAG (which apparently really is a flag) not being saved properly. The upshot (for a player) is that you shouldn’t save during either of these bits of the game.

With these additional lurking grues out of the way, I was able to make it to the end of the game:

Speaking of saving, MDL Zork only has a single restore file. It is stored in the MTRZORK directory and is named ZORK.SAVE. Of course you can create additional saves by copying out this save file to different names.

If you too want to play the original Zork using the original PDP-10 MDL source code, you should be able to build the MDL interpreter necessary from the release at Matthew Russotto’s site (where my minor patches should be incorporated): http://www.russotto.net/git/mrussotto/confusion/releases or from the git repo with my patches at https://github.com/emacsomancer/confusion-mdl.

Or, the easiest of all, install it via Guix (which can installed on top of your current distro as a standalone package manager), as I have created a Guix package which was accepted upstream (the package name in Guix is confusion-mdl). [note: this Guix package stopped building some time ago and I need to figure out what needs fixing. Right now, have a look at the mdlzork project at https://github.com/jordanhubbard/mdlzork , which provides a way to easily play early versions of Zork online at https://jordanhubbard.github.io/mdlzork/.]

Since I played through this right before designing the propositional logic homework for my Semantics class, my students are currently “enjoying” doing Zork-flavoured propositional logic translations, e.g.:

1. The thief only steals your things when you’re in the cellar.
2. Your sword glows blue whenever the thief or the troll is near and never any other time.
3. Whether or not you are lost in a maze of twisty little passages (all alike), the grues are lurking in the darkness.
4. The grues will eat you unless you bring a light source.

# Wrapper to run the Firefox built and packaged by Nix
MESA_LIB=$(dirname $(realpath /run/current-system/profile/lib/libGL.so)) #To get webgl working
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MESA_LIB${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:}$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
#export FONTCONFIG_PATH="$(guix build fontconfig)/etc/fonts${FONTCONFIG_PATH:+:}$FONTCONFIG_PATH"
export FONTCONFIG_PATH="$(guix build fontconfig)/etc/fonts"
exec -a "$0" "/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/profile/bin/firefox" "$@"

And then add ~/.local/bin to your $PATH in ~/.profile.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get that to work, though I could be doing something daft.

I figured out the following (elaborate) alternative workaround for Firefox (no luck for Chromium):

• 1. Install Docker via Nix. Launch with sudo dockerd.
• 2. Create a Dockerfile for Firefox

# firefox in a docker container
# the following line will start firefox in the container, thus
# video and sound will be played on the host machine
FROM alpine:edge
MAINTAINER slade@jnanam.net

# add testing repo + install packages + add user and group
RUN echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/" >> /etc/apk/repositories \
    && apk add --no-cache \
       xz \
       dbus-x11 \
       ttf-dejavu \          # a bunch of fonts; you may not want all of these
       ttf-freefont \
       ttf-ubuntu-font-family \
       font-noto \
       font-noto-extra \
       font-noto-emoji \
       font-noto-oriya \
       font-noto-tamil \
       font-noto-avestan \
       font-noto-gothic \
       font-noto-myanmar \
       font-noto-telugu \
       font-noto-deseret \
       font-noto-bengali \
       font-noto-kannada \
       font-noto-ethiopic \
       font-noto-armenian \
       font-noto-tibetan \
       font-noto-sinhala \
       font-noto-gurmukhi \
       font-noto-malayalam \
       font-noto-gujarati \
       font-noto-devanagari \
       font-noto-thai \
       font-noto-adlam \
       font-noto-nko \
       font-noto-lisu \
       font-noto-carian \
       font-noto-buhid \
       font-noto-osage \
       font-noto-hebrew \
       font-noto-arabic \
       font-noto-chakma \
       font-noto-gothic \
       font-noto-khmer \
       font-noto-cypriot \
       font-noto-kayahli \
       font-noto-mandaic \
       font-noto-olchiki \
       font-noto-thaana \
       font-noto-georgian \
       font-noto-shavian \
       font-noto-cherokee \
       font-noto-oldturkic \
       font-noto-osmanya \
       font-noto-glagolitic \
       font-noto-tifinagh \
       font-noto-adlamunjoined \
       font-noto-nko \
       font-noto-lao \
       arc-theme \
       hunspell \
       hunspell-en \
       firefox \
       libcanberra-gtk2 \
       pulseaudio \
    && rm -fr /var/cache/apk/* \
    && adduser -D -u 1000 -g 1000 user

# add user's work
WORKDIR /home/user

# switch to user
USER user

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/bin/firefox", "--no-remote"]

Save the above out to a file Dockerfile in some directory. cd to that directory. Then create a Docker container with docker build -t someprefix/firefox . (with someprefix being whatever you like).

• 3. Create in ~/.local/bin/firefox:

#!/bin/sh
# Wrapper to run the Chromium built and packaged by Nix
xhost +local:docker@; \
docker run --rm -it -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix/:/tmp/.X11-unix \
-v /dev/snd:/dev/snd \
-v /run/user/$USER_UID/pulse:/run/pulse:ro \
-v /home/$USER/.mozilla:/home/user/.mozilla \
-v /home/$USER/.cache/mozilla:/home/user/.cache/mozilla \
-v /tmp/Downloads:/tmp/Downloads \
-v /home/$USER/.gtkrc-2.0:/home/user/.gtkrc-2.0 \
-v /home/$USER/.config/gtk-3.0/:/home/user/.config/gtk-3.0 \
-v /home/$USER/.nix-profile/share/fonts/truetype:/usr/share/fonts/truetype-nix \ # for nix fonts, if you have them here
-v /home/$USER/.nix-profile/share/fonts/ubuntu:/usr/share/fonts/ubuntu-nix \     # ditto
-v /home/$USER/.nix-profile/share/fonts/noto:/usr/share/fonts/noto-nix \         # ditto
-v /home/$USER/.guix-profile/share/fonts/truetype:/user/share/fonts/truetype-guix \ # for guix fonts, if you have them here
-v /home/$USER/.guix-profile/share/fonts/opentype:/usr/share/fonts/opentype-guix \ # ditto
 --shm-size 2g  --privileged someprefix/firefox  # substitute your prefix here for "someprefix"

Where again someprefix is whatever you chose before. chmod +x ~/.local/bin/firefox and then you can run Firefox with firefox. (You’ll have to make sure dockerd is running.)

Perhaps this could be useful elsewhere. It has the advantage of being a nice Alpine Linux musl-libc/libressl build of Firefox running inside your GuixSD (or whatever you’re using).

What doesn’t work:

• Spellchecking - I don’t quite know why, hunspell should be available. Just disable spellchecking for now (otherwise everything will be underlined in red).
• Wire‘s web portal.
• Saving or uploading from anywhere but /tmp/Downloads (but this is a feature really).
• If you want CJK fonts, you’ll have to install them in Nix or Guix (Alpine doesn’t seem to have any); this is indicated in the Firefox launch script above.

It’s a fascinating distro, modelled on Nix, but implemented in Guile. It’s not been exactly easy to get running (one of the videos on GuixSD from Fosdem 2017 included the line “[GuixSD] is like Gentoo for grown ups”), in part because its architecture is rather different from what I’ve experienced with other Linux distros, which use different package managers perhaps and sometimes even different libc’s, but generally follow a similar design philosophy. Rather than spreading out configuration across lots of different pieces, GuixSD seems to largely try to concentrate it in specific configuration files which are transactional in that they can be rolled back (and thus the system can be rolled back to known working states).

It is a GNU-blessed distro, and does take the FSF’s hard line (and to my eyes sometimes weird line) approach to software. So no proprietary software is included in the Guix repos, including firmware (and it runs on the linux-libre kernel). That by itself is fine, but it means the state of affairs for Guix-packaged browsers is pretty poor. No Chromium, no Firefox. IceCat 52 is essentially what’s currently available (if IceCat were up to the latest Firefox ESR 60, it might be easier) in terms of browsers which might be considered secure.

This led me to try to use the Nix installer by itself^* to try to install Firefox and Chromium. Sadly, I can’t get Nix’s Chromium to work at all on GuixSD, and while Firefox works fine, I can’t get it to see my locally installed fonts (or other fonts I’ve installed via Nix).

Hopefully at some point Next Browser will be packaged for Guix, to bring in another major component written in (Common) Lisp. And when (if?) IceCat 60 comes out, that will alleviate the pain somewhat. (I was a long-time Conkeror user, and I briefly tried it again in GuixSD, but I’m not certain of its security and uBlock Origin no long works with it, which I believe is why I stopped using it in the first place).

Other interesting Lispy pieces include mcron, a cron which accepts (as well as Vixie cron style, I think) Guile config files. The examples in Guix manual I couldn’t really get to work. But via the help-guix listserv I found that one can put simple guile scripts in ~/.config/cron/job.guile. Working out how to do a ‘run this every N minutes’ was not immediately obvious, but I figured out how to do it, e.g.:

; execute run_me every 5 minutes
(job '(next-minute (range 0 60 5)) "run_me")
; run execute_me every 2 hours
(job '(next-hour (range 0 24 2)) "execute_me")

One of the other great things about GuixSD is that its init manager, GNU Shepherd, is also written in Guile Scheme. I’ve only had a chance to play with it a little bit, but it seems very nice and it’s good to find other innovative init managers (I would mention here also runit and s6) which take very different approaches to systemd (another innovative init, or perhaps init+, but one that creates more problems than it solves in the end, in my experience).

On the Guix package manager itself: I learned the hard way that searching for packages in Guix is really only comfortable within Emacs: so do guix package -i guix-emacs and then do everything else from guix-emacs within Emacs ( M-x guix-search-by-name to search package names by regex; and M-x guix-search-by-regex to search names+descriptions by regex). The results returned by guix package -s .... in a terminal are not very browseable (though I tried valiantly for some time). But if you’re interested in Guix, you’ll likely interested in Emacs anyway.

What I’m trying to build on this machine is something with lots of Lisp. Of course the kernel is still a kernel written in C, as are lots of the other pieces like the terminal &c., but much of the user-facing things: the package manager, the windows manager, the init, the job scheduler (=cron), and (most importantly perhaps) the ‘text editor’ (read: document composer, email interface, irc interface, twitter interface, blog post interface, code editor …) are all largely written in and interacted with using some form of Lisp (Guile Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp).

Guix is a bit like Emacs, I think. It’s an incredibly powerful tool with lots of interesting possibilities, but when you start using it you’re presented with an empty screen with little indication of what you can do. I’ll be sticking with it, I think. Now I’ve got to get to grips with StumpWM and figure out how to configure polybar…

[And if you’re curious about why Guix is pronounced like “geeks”, have a look at this post over on my linguistics blog.]

* As well as being the package managers of both of their respective distros, both the Nix and Guix package managers can be used on top of other distros. Nix doesn’t have quite the same hard line approach to software licences as Guix.