If only delivery companies would deliver parcels to post offices, who then deliver all the parcels in one go once a day. Update: I guess that's a PO Box does #til.
Sander van Dragt's Notes
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Fixing some annoyances in elementaryOS with the help of AI, my patches are personal and build on top of the current apps, but feel free to integrate them upstream. #projects #elementaryos-patches
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WordPress Admin isn't a great markdown writer
I spent an afternoon trying to make WordPress a markdown editor. wp-env, a small mu-plugin that unhooks the admin chrome, another mu-plugin that swaps TinyMCE for EasyMDE, Parsedown converting on save into
post_content, with the raw markdown kept in post meta so editing round-trips. It works; task lists render, the toolbar behaves, edits come back as markdown.But it's still wp-admin. The textarea sits inside the post edit screen, surrounded by sidebars and metaboxes and the admin bar, and none of that goes away just because the editor itself is now markdown. The thing I'm doing is still configuring a post in an admin panel, not writing, and polishing the EasyMDE chrome made it look nicer but didn't change that.
Maybe I should have just enabled the Micropub plugin and IndieAuth for the auth side, and post from iA Writer. iA Writer does the writing, WordPress does the storing and publishing, and I don't have to bend wp-admin into something it isn't.
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How do you like the 2026 Lamb theme?
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Working on #Fafi tonight with new features and a visual refresh.
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Built a quick ClaudeGuage StreamDeck key to show Claude usage that doesn’t use private apis.
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Sidewing - a xbar style top bar for elementaryOS
I was looking to monitor developer related metrics when I noticed that there's no bitbar / xbar for Linux! In the age of AI-assisted engineering, that's no longer a massive time commitment, so I built one.
Sidewing is a GTK4 desktop bar for elementary OS-style multi-monitor setups. It runs local executable plugins, parses xbar-style output, and renders the result in a slim bar window on a selected display.
Current target:
- elementary OS 8 / Linux desktop environments with X11
- GTK4 + Vala
- local, unsandboxed script plugins
Sidewing discovers and runs plugins, schedules refreshes from xbar-style filenames, renders a translucent bar, and opens per-plugin popover menus with a built-in variables editor. See Current Limitations for scope boundaries.
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#til It turns out that Jira, the only web software that you need to upgrade your fibre connection for, is a lot faster if you bring your own GUI.
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The problem with the Touch Bar
Michael Tsai posts another excellent roundup and in the midst of it, nails down what Apple got wrong about the Touch Bar:
There’s this amazing, programmable screen, but there wasn’t really any way to empower the user to do stuff with it.
My take: Apple has collectively forgotten what makes a personal computer, you know, personal because it has been hammering their doors and windows shut for the last 15 years.
It’s not about changing the shade of paint on the door, it’s about swapping in bespoke fixtures because the original ones have sharp edges. #technology
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Hello Browser 0.2.0
Hello Browser is a webview window for desktop web apps (written in vala, GTK4, for linux). The goal is to bundle a locally-served web app into something that behaves like a native desktop app.
What's new
- Links that open in a new window now open in your default browser. Previously, clicking a
target="_blank"link did nothing — the new window request was silently dropped. Hello Browser now hands those URLs off to whatever browser you've set as your system default. - Pass a URL directly. You can now run
hello-browser https://example.orgwithout the--urlflag. - Site launchers via
make desktop. A new Makefile target generates.desktopentries so a wrapped site shows up in your application menu like any other app.
Under the hood
- Ported from GTK3 / WebKitGTK 4.0 to GTK4 + WebKitGTK 6.0. You'll need the GTK4 and WebKitGTK 6.0 development packages to build.
- Build system streamlined; README updated with current setup instructions.
- Links that open in a new window now open in your default browser. Previously, clicking a